Employee Internet management software maker Websense says its URL database turns up 17 times more adult Websites today than in 2000, going from about 88,000 in 2000 to over 1.6 million today and growing – and that not all the visitors are going there of their own free will. And at least one adult Internet attorney is miffed over the group's broad-brush painting that implies most adult sites engage in that kind of coercion.
"This dramatic growth has been fueled by new technology such as high-speed Internet connections and streaming media, as well as innovative guerrilla tactics used by porn vendors to attract and keep visitors at their sites," Websense said announcing their findings April 5. "With unlimited access to a high-speed Internet connection and streaming media at work, employees can be easily lured to X-rated sites - knowingly or unwittingly."
Florida-based attorney Lawrence G. Walters denounced the finding. "Once again, all adult Webmasters are being painted with the same broad brush," Walters told AVNOnline.com. "The industry is populated with ethical, hard working business owners, but the bad apples typically catch the attention of the media."
Websense cited a finding from Nielsen/NetRatings saying about 34 million (approximately one in four) U.S. Internet surfers visited adult sites last August, and a finding from ComScore Networks saying 37 percent of workers with Net access have visited adult Websites while on the job.
"As the availability of bandwidth and high-speed Internet connections increases, so has the quality and quantity of online programming - especially in pornography," Websense chief technology officer Harold Kester said announcing the company finding. "Offering employees unlimited broadband connectivity and access to streaming video is the equivalent of installing an adult theater on each desktop."
Even workers who don't want to visit adult sites on the job may be going there without meaning to, Websense said, because some site owners buy expired domains for innocent-sounding sites and use them to re-route surfers unwittingly to newly-posted adult sites. The company claimed victims of that tactic – known as mousetrapping, a tactic customarily shunned by legitimate adult Websites – include the government of the Netherlands and the Boston Philharmonic.
The company also claims adult site vendors have hacked into non-adult Websites to restock them with adult content, citing a February incident in which a New York lawmaker's re-election campaign site was hijacked by a porn vendor and treated visiting voters to a guide to "help find the best porn sites in the world."
Kester said adult Internet companies are "incredibly aggressive and do whatever it takes to attract and keep visitors, from hacking into existing mainstream sites to stopping surfers from leaving their sites altogether. In addition to putting the company at risk for sexual harassment or hostile workplace lawsuits, Internet porn clogs up valuable company bandwidth as well as wastes IT management's time."
Walters said statements like Websense's amplify the need for an effective adult Internet trade group which can balance the media with industry-based perspective and present a best-practices guideline for the industry itself as a prerequisite for belonging to such a group.
But Walters doesn't necessarily dispute Websense's call on the size of the adult Internet or the likely volume of its viewership. "It is well-known that the most profitable facets of the Website industry are the adult and gambling sites," he said. "Despite the oft-repeated claims that the public is fed up with computer porn, these statistics appear to indicate that the adult industry is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. Somebody is looking at all that content.”
Websense isn't exactly excited about peer-to-peer online networking, either – the company said in March that they were concerned about P2P users getting more than they bargain for when they go to download music or video. "(They) might actually be opening an avenue of attack for hackers," vice president for marketing and business development Kian Saneii said at the time. "By connecting users directly to each other to download and swap files, the latest generation of P2P networks bypasses normal security barriers and are easily exploited by hackers to spread viruses, worms, and spyware."
