Sex Tech: Porn filesharing suits go too far, Anonymous vs. pedos

This is the week in Sex Tech where we see a tipping point for mass-filesharing lawsuits, we glimpse Facebook's user chat snooping to protect the children, the Skout app innovates teen-user security, and more.

You may or may not remember porn copyright lawyer Evan Stone from previous coverage here: in 2010 he featured in Porn Filesharing Lawsuits Crest 30K Defendants as the braggart lawyer representing Hustler/LFP (among others) in aggressive mass lawsuits.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit cemented sanctions against Stone for sending subpoenas to defendants without the court's permission - to obtain their names and addresses illegally and likely proceed with his standard shakedown letters that threaten to 'name and shame' unless people pay up.

The Wall Street Journal writes,

U.S. District Judge David Godbey used words like “wanton” and “grave” to describe Mr. Stone’s conduct.

 

The judge accused Mr. Stone of transforming the use of subpoenas “from a bona fide state-sanctioned inspection into private snooping.”

• Sanctions, Subpoenas and Porn: A Copyright Tale (WSJ)

Porn filesharing lawsuit victim: enough is enough

The latest news in the world of copyright-trolling porn companies is that one of the people that the porn world tried to shake down with a trolling attempt has hit back with a racketeering lawsuit, which she's set to turn into a class action.

• Class Action Racketeering Lawsuit Filed Against Copyright Trolling Porn Companies (Techdirt)

It was revealed this week that Facebook employs software that scans users' private chats for certain keywords that trigger alerts, and hand the suspicious users over to police.

The social network disclosed this after allegedly catching an adult suspect soliciting an underage user for sex.

In a closer look at the chat spying, Reuters examines Facebook's methods for monitoring user chats and finds worryingly uneven results.

• Social networks scan for sexual predators, with uneven results (Reuters)

Last month mobile app Skout closed the teen area of its social network when three adults were arrested after using the app to target minors and sexually assault them.

Friday Skout reopened the service to teens with new, focused and well-thought-out security measures in place.

They should be considered for best practices in this kind of crisis: Skout appointed a team of security specialists to analyze the situation, beef up security and innovate better ways to handle age checks in social apps.

• Skout Reopens Social App for Teenagers (NYTimes)

Anonymous vs. pedo websites: round two

While it's important to note that Anonymous's targeting of pedo websites is not new (see previous coverage of their pedo attacks here), they announced last weekend that they are again are ramping up to take out more pedophile sites.

Their previous campaigns have been extremely successful.

Operation PedoChat is once again targeting pedophiles; Anon's crosshairs are currently aimed at some 100 websites.

• Anonymous has a new target: Pedophiles (ZDNet)

Webacm pedo-creep was tech-savvy

An Indiana man was formally charged Tuesday with tricking 10 teenagers in nine different states into performing sex acts on webcam that he recorded and used to coerce them into making more sexually explicit videos.

U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett called it a systematic scheme to victimize hundreds of children.

The victims were nine boys and one girl, all between the ages of 12 and 16, according to the charges.

The creep would run video back to the minors as if it were being recorded on his cam, to fool them into thinking they were seeing live video - few of them ever saw what he actually looked like.

• Feds find more coerced sex victims of Indiana man (The Sacramento Bee)