December 7th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Happy Swinger
Model Luana Piovani seems to be enjoying life as a swinger:
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December 6th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Rainy Day Car Sex
The alley is a little bit seedy and the weather is terrible, but the car is fine and what we can see of the lady seems to match the car:
Via Kinky Delight. Artwork is from the cover of a Primo magazine.
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December 5th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
How To Rescue 60 Terabytes Of Tumblr Porn
My post this morning gave you the tools to backup and save your own porn tumblr, plus perhaps a handful of others. Good. You’ve carried your fully-loaded book bag safely out of the burning library. Now what else can you do?
Say hello to our rogue archivist friends at Archive Team. Powered by “rage, paranoia, and kleptomania” in all their data-rescue efforts, their Tumblr project page and associated IRC channel indicate that they’re rumbling and grumbling into full power-up mode on this Tumblr #pornocalypse crisis. Their previous data-rescue exploits are legendary. They can’t get it all, but they are going to get a bunch. How can we, how can you, help?
I’ve been monitoring their public-facing channels. From what I can tell, here’s what’s going on. They are tweaking the scripts for the software they use for distributed scraping and downloading. (They call it “Archive Team Warrior.”) When Warrior is ready — hopefully real soon now — if you’ve got a good internet connection you could help by running an instance of that.
But even before it starts to run, they need a list of Tumblr porn blogs to feed into the Warrior. They’ve already got lists of course, massive ones. But the lists are far from complete. They want more and better ones. There’s a web form here where you can contribute your favorite porn Tumblr URLs. The form accepts ten URLs at a time, but you can fill it out as many times as you like. And if you have a much bigger list? Just paste it up online somewhere and paste the URL to that into the form — they’ll make it work.
All told, based on past experience, they figure they have time and bandwidth and volunteers enough to rescue maybe 60 terabytes of porn blogs. That’s enormous — but it’s only a tenth, maybe a twentieth, of the total amount of the porn on Tumblr. (Everybody is guessing; these are wild-ass guesses.) Still, it will be a massive save if it works. What will happen to all that data?
Eventually — and these things can take a lot of time — the idea is that rescued blogs can end up in the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Every terabyte that winds up in the Wayback machine adds, they estimate, about $1500 to $2,000 in long term cost. Archive.org donations are needed, and welcome.
December 5th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
How To Back Up An Adult Tumblr (2018 Edition)
OK, Monday was our day to smack foreheads and react to the Tumblr porn ban. Tuesday was our day to mourn the loss of communities. For people who need a new home, yesterday began the migration process, or at least the search for a destination. Today? For me it’s a day to act. I’m a porn curator, and I’m aghast at the collections that will burn on December 17. What little I can do to fight those fires starts today.
Five years ago when I first saw this shitshow coming, I researched and advised the community on backup options for adult tumblrs. But since then, Tumblr has taken several technical steps to make porn tumblrs harder to view or copy. And fundamentally, I’m a technical idiot. I gloomily thought all my old advice was obsolete, which is why I wrote this fundamentally wrong depressed Eeyore shit on Monday:
I haven’t tested, but I don’t think the advice in that post would work any more, now that you have to be logged in to Tumblr even to view your own porn blog. (I could be wrong.)
Reader, I was wrong. After consulting with my good friend Dr. Faustus at Erotic Mad Science, who is technically sharper than me and who has spent much of the past five years diligently rescuing material of interest from Tumblr and turning it into a deep and intricate set of self-hosted blogs, he pointed me at some instructional material that set me straight. It turns out that I can pick the best backup solution from my old article, add one screenshot with a single new setting (the password/login you need to be able to see porn on Tumblr), and we are back in backup business! (Product best when used before December 17, 2018, contents may settle in shipping.)
How To Back Up An Adult Tumblr
These are instructions for using HTTrack/WinHTTrack Website Copier to make a local mirror of any Tumblr in a folder on your hard drive. HTTrack is a free-software GPL general utility for copying and mirroring websites, available for most current versions of Windows as well as for a wide variety of Linux/Unix flavors. The Windows version presents a fairly old-fashioned interface with a bunch of cryptic options, but most of them come pre-set with sensible defaults that you actually don’t need to mess with. Plus, there’s good documentation.
Download the software and install it. Windows will probably try to scare you out of completing the install. Be bold, be brave. Trust your open source software developers.
Now run the the software. You’ll be presented with a welcome screen where you need to click “Next”. Then, this screen:
The arrows show you the two fields that need your attention. All you really need to do is give this backup project a name and tell the software where to save the backup. Then hit “Next”:
The two red arrows above screen point to mandatory buttons that need our attention. The first one opens the screen where we tell Tumblr the URL of the porn tumblr you want to download. It will be something like: http://yourtumblr.tumblr.com — this doesn’t have to be your tumblr URL though, it can be any tumblr you want to save, like one that nobody has updated in five years that you know will be going dark in two weeks. This is also where you input your Tumblr login information, to prove to Tumblr that you’re special enough to view porn. This does have to be your login, no matter whose blog you are downloading.
The next screen is the one you see when you push the “Set options” button, which is absolutely vital. When you do, you’ll see this:
I’ve pointed arrows at three optional settings tabs that you may want to adjust, and at the one mandatory options tab where you must change a setting. I’m going to ignore the optional ones for now, except to say that you would tinker with these if you wanted to change the sorts of media files you’re saving beyond the basic .gif, .jpg, and .png (you’d need to do this if you were saving a Tumblr that had .wav files or .zip files or .mp3s), or if you need to limit this program from slamming your internet connection too hard. It’s the mandatory “Spider” tab you really need to click:
See the box where it says “follow robots.txt rules”? Change it using the drop-down menu to say “no robots.txt rules” so that this software (your robot) will know to ignore Tumblr’s robot-hostile electronic “keep out” signs.
Yay! We’re almost done. Hit the “OK” button, hit “Next”, hit “Finish”, and your site copying should begin.
How long it will take to finish depends on the available bandwidth of your net connection, the memory and processing speed of your computer, and on whether you tweaked any of the options that control things like how many simultaneous connections your computer is making and how many files it’s trying to download in parallel. It also depends on how many pages there are on the Tumblr blog you are backing up, and on how big the images are. The default settings seem to be fairly gentle about not maxing out your internet connection or putting an unruly amount of strain on the server at the site you are trying to copy. Using default settings and a fairly crappy internet connection, I downloaded an ancient porn blog overnight last night. It had 3,300 posts and took up 1.8GB on my hard drive.
What does success look like? You’ll have a folder on your hard drive with the name you provided on the first options screen. If you open it, you will find many sub-folders, and much that may seem mysterious. You should also find a file called “index.html” — and if you click on it, it should open in a new browser window where you’ll be looking at your backed up Tumblr site, using nothing but the files on your hard drive.
What have we not accomplished? Well, you’ve made what should be a full and true copy, but it’s not a nice clean export in some standard format that you could use to easily import all your posts into another content management system or blogging tool. HTML files and related images are scattered through a system of directories and subdirectories that, while logical, may not be the simplest thing to work with. Using the data you’ve got, a clever computer person could generate an XHTML document (or something similar) that could be semi-automatically imported into (say) WordPress. But it would take parsing; it would take work. Figuring out how to take the copy you just made and turn it back into a non-Tumblr website is a solvable problem, but how easy or hard it might be to actually do it depends on your access to computer expertise and tools. For now, you’re safe in the knowledge that you’ve got all the posts you’ve made this past however-many years. You’ve got the images, you’ve got their metadata (any tags you set for them and any credits you may have reblogged or included) and you’ve got the clever things you said about them, all, safe on your hard drive.
Now would be a good time to back up your hard drive. I’m just sayin’.
Additional caveats and warnings and gotchas and thoughts:
1) This might or might not work on your own porn tumblr after December 17. Tumblr hasn’t said it will delete porn, just that it will make it invisible to everyone but the owner. But I don’t trust them not to continue deleting stuff. I wouldn’t wait. And for any blog you don’t own, this will almost certainly stop working. Every old porn tumblr that is no longer being updated? This is a way to make a copy on your hard drive. Hurry! Don’t wait. Hell is coming, but so is December 17. December 17 will get here first.
2) You have to type your Tumblr login and password into HTTrack to use this method. There’s a good chance that login information gets recorded in the many complex files HTTrack writes to your hard drive. If you ever turn those files over to someone who is, say, helping you convert those files into a WordPress blog — or if, say, you send them off to the Internet Archive for posterity — your password could be exposed. It might be smart to set up a “burner password” on Tumblr that you never used anywhere else and will never use again before firing up HTTrack.
3) There is a method offered by Tumblr for doing a fancier and more complete export of the Tumblr blogs that belong to you, including some of the social interaction metadata. I have not covered it here because it appears not to be very reliable; in every case available to me for testing, it failed permanently with a “processing backup” message that never ends or goes away. So I decided not to waste your time with the instructions for making that attempt. I have heard precisely one account on Twitter of a successful official export.
I hope this helps!
December 4th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Thou Shalt Commit Adultery
Boy oh boy, this commandment is very different than the one I remember them hammering into my head at Bible study:
It’s from a 1631 bible in the British Museum, but at least one curator is suspicious (I think with good reason) that the ostensible misprint was deliberate, rather than “the most unfortunate mistake in the entire history of printing.”
It would be a very different religion today if that misprint (or subtle act of rebellion) had carried the day, don’t you think?
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December 3rd, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Tumblr #Pornocalypse Endgame: Porn Banned
It’s official: Tumblr has banned porn, effective December 17, 2018. Rest in obscurity, Tumblr.
This is not a surprise to me; I officially gave up on Tumblr for grownups in summer of 2017, when I wrote:
We all knew that Tumblr’s run as the place to run free porn blogs had to end someday.
And:
So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.
It was five, almost six years ago now that I offered adult bloggers on Tumblr advice on how to back up their Tumblr porn blogs and escape from that particular prison. I haven’t tested, but I don’t think the advice in that post would work any more, now that you have to be logged in to Tumblr even to view your own porn blog. (I could be wrong.) Still, it gives you an idea. It wasn’t hard to see this disaster coming.
Indeed, this disaster was always coming. It’s an ErosBlog byword: The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. Wherever you are. On every platform. The #pornocalypse is coming. It will find you. It always does. The internet uses porn to jumpstart every new tech and platform, and then when things get respectable and profitable, porn gets thrown unceremoniously out with the garbage, to “clean things up around here” for the squeamish bankers and capitalists. Thus does the pornocalypse come for us all. Over and over again. It’s an endlessly repeating pattern.
Hence, Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.” Put it on your own website first and primarily. Use all the other platforms to promote your site. That way, the endless rolling #pornocalypse? It can’t hurt you quite as much. It still hurts, but it can’t disasterize you, not like it does if you build your digital life on a platform they can take away.
I wrote off Tumblr a long time ago. But I still hate them fuckers for all the people they are making digitally homeless in two weeks. I saw it coming, yeah. But that doesn’t make me feel smarter and smug; it just makes me feel helpless and ragey. I’m sorry, everyone.
The #pornocalypse comes for us all.
Update: Tumblr finally published a blog post supposedly explaining the policy change. It’s a bunch of disconnected marketing blather that does nothing of the sort; I won’t waste your time by reproducing it here. The closest thing to a concrete explanation given is that by banning porn they hope to “create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.” Yeah, good luck with that.
December 2nd, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Vice Turns Stale Chinese Propaganda Into Nude Clickbait
The Vice headline is lurid. Just a few days ago, on November 28, it screams at us: Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans. The article is breathless and couched in very current terms:
According to the latest research … some fintech companies [in China] are letting people pay for small daily purchases like burgers or biscuits on a long-term, monthly instalment basis.
In a country where cost of living is high and the chances of getting a credit card are relatively low, this new form of e-commerce has opened up a world of possibilities for a whole lot of Chinese millennials. Because it’s 2018, though, there’s also a dark side to the system. Sure, you can get a 475 gram box of Oreos and pay it back in monthly instalments of 41 cents over three years, or go jetski-shopping with peanuts to your name. But first you might have to send some nudes.
A number of dodgy lenders have realised that young shoppers are desperate for loans, and are demanding that customers hand over naked selfies as collateral.
All wording is present-tense, and no hint of scepticism about sourcing is voiced. There are links you can follow, though. And so implausible do I find this traveler’s tale — how is a nude photo useful as collateral? — that I decided to go looking at the sourcing.
It turns out that Vice was just clickbait-remilling (which is to say, ripping off) this more detailed Australian news story, which offers much more clarity about what’s going on — supposedly a sort of extortion-collection ring — and its Chinese sourcing:
In 2016, 10 gigabits of naked selfies of 161 young female students holding their photo IDs were leaked online by illegal microloan providers who had asked for the pictures as collateral for the loans.
Most of the victims were young female college students – aged between 19 and 23 years old – from China’s under-developed regions, according to a November 2016 report published by state media outlet China Youth Daily.
The victims told the Daily they were usually approached by the dodgy lenders on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat or QQ – a replica of ICQ – and that the interest rates and conditions were poorly explained to the chat groups with hundreds of members.
According to the report, the college students usually borrowed between $1,000 to $2,000 with interest rates up to 30 per cent, and lenders threatened to leak the naked photos to their family and friends when they failed to repay the loan on time.
Other young women were given the option to work in the sex industry to pay off their debt.
China’s Central Public Security Comprehensive Management Commission cited one case where Bing Chen, a resident in China’s eastern Nanjing city, received a nude photo of his daughter, Xue Chen, via a text message from an illegal lender.
Xue Chen reportedly sent several nude pictures of herself to receive a 4,000 yuan loan ($800), which jumped to 100,000 yuan ($20,000) in just six months, according to the Commission.
During that period, Xue Chen was pressured to send more nude pictures and videos of herself in order to extend the due date of her repayment.
Despite the Commission’s efforts to crack down in December 2016 on what are widely-know as “naked loan services”, recent local media reports say the notorious practice is still rife on some Chinese social media platforms.
However, Ms Chen of Euromonitor, said the situation has improved since late 2017 when China’s financial regulators enforced new rules forbidding unlicensed organisations and individuals from conducting a lending business.
Lenders were also prohibited from encouraging over-borrowing, abusive debt collection, and stealing customers’ private information, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.
So what did I learn when I dug into this traveler’s tale, as filtered through the Vice clickbait mill? Vice had a couple of lurid mosaic-blur nudie mugshots as their story graphic; those turned out to be sourced via the Australian story from the 2016 naked-selfies leak:
Nothing but stubborn skepticism (those would be easy to fake) and lack of trust in Chinese state news outlets makes me question that those photos are a real thing. (Why did 161 sets of still photos add to to 10 gigabits of data? But even so.) Assume that there really was a microlending ring using shame as collateral operating a couple of years ago in rural China. I’m not sure that 161 customers in a nation of 1.3 billion people makes a “rampant” problem as Vice called it, but move past that. The Central Public Security Comprehensive Management Commission managed to cite a grand total of one case where a family member got sent an embarrassing photo. The state news organization who was crusading against these so-called “naked lenders” baldly claimed “other young women were given the option to work in the sex industry to pay off their debt” without offering any specifics whatsoever — a classic case of layering baseless sex-trafficking panic onto whatever crusade you are waging at the moment.
What I make of all this is that in 2016, the Chinese government diagnosed a serious case of chump-change loansharks operating over social media. Because these microlenders were, essentially, small-time gangsters, they were using any leverage they could think of to secure their loans. Then somebody got nabbed with a thumb drive with some naked selfies on it. And that got leaked as part of the government’s propaganda case against these social media loansharks, which itself (the propaganda case) was part of a broader regulatory crackdown (because that’s how things are done in China).
Thus, it’s old news, it’s not from any inherently trustworthy source, and the only actual evidence (the heavily doctored photos) was released as part of a state propaganda campaign and is part of a data dump that never claimed to contain more than 161 individuals.
In all this there’s absolutely nothing to support Vice’s breathless present-tense clickbait headline. But I guess you don’t get the clicks for Chinese Authorities Broke Up Tiny Micro Loanshark Ring Two Years Ago For Extorting Repayment With Naked Selfies.
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