Clarification required, please

Is this statement actually true? Vast majority is what, 80 - 90 percent?

I've never looked either at or for pornography on the internet (and I don't intend starting now) but I'd like to know whether your statement is factual or just hyperbole.

I'll check back tonight.

Thanks nightbloom.

Not sure what the estimated

Not sure what the estimated percentage is now. I doubt it's as high at 90%. I think the last estimate I read gave a ballpark figure of three-quarters (75%) porn content. I'm not sure if this has changed in the recent past as non-porn content has evolved (Wiki, youtube, blogger, friendster, etc.)

Regardless, it's a pretty big slice. And content % aside, there's the question of per capita useage. What percentage of internet users out there use it predominantly for porn?

I'm not making a value-judgment against porn - But I think content and useage are relevant criteria when evaluating the rationale for making wi-fi access a publicly funded service in urban jurisdictions.

The new pen and paper

Large Wi-Fi zones already exist in Japan and Hong Kong, their challenges were overcome and to my knowledge the Hong Kong one is free.

Such collaboration communication equates to the new pen and paper.

As I recall the start of publishing (after the bible was done) included a lot of porn at first also...nothing new there.

Once a major North American metro area sets up a network like this, for free, and word gets out about it...expect a tech boom in that location...at least until another major center gets one that is better. Tech booms will flow around the planet like quicksilver and be just as hard to predict or capture with oven mitts.

Quote:As I recall the start

No way - where did you get that one? There's a lot new here.

It certainly existed, in cartoon form on walls or in highly exceptional (usually non-Western) illustrated texts like the Kama Sutra. And even these were extremely rare, extremely expensive, and extremely upper-class items. We've got literary erotica from antiquity, like the Satyricon and some of the Greek poems - but they're still a tiny amount relative to the entire corpus. I don't think the Gutenburg press, the imprinted wood engravings or the monastic textual illustrators in the scriptoria of Medieval Europe ever produced much "chicks-with-dicks", and certainly not on the scale now available over the internet...let alone made universally accessible by the kind of publicly funded subsided wi-fi networks discussed in this article. C'mon.

As enamored as Canada Post of ISPs

For many, Net literacy is becoming an essential tool to fully function in today's world. Free Wi Fi is a positive step to reducing barriers that many face to the computer networking medium.

Obviously, there will be vested interests much opposed. Current providers might expected to be as enamored of the "free" system as Canada Post is of ISP's.

Who, after being jerked around by one or more ISPs, and being subjected to bait-and-switch, wouldn't vote for a tax-financed, city-wide Wi Fi system?

Wrong technology

I think this is the wrong approach.

WiFi was developed for short-range communication over distances of approximately 100 meters. It is essentially a local-area technology (LAN) and was not designed for metropolitan area networking (MAN), and will require many access points for a relatively small area.

It will also stiffle the development of more advanced MAN or WAN wireless technology like broadband wireless.

Furthermore, if wireless technology is now going to be Govt sponsored public service, why not start with telephones. More people have wireless phones than wireless computers, and they are arguably more useful.

Government doesn't need to

Government doesn't need to build it. But it would be nice if they took part in setting standards. I think wireless mesh networks are the way to go. The standard is set, you buy and install your kit, and it connects to and adds to the network. Check this out:
http://bcwireless.net/

I don't think that the other cities who have tried building these from scratch have fared too well so far, and that's just the ones who can get past the whining of the local incumbent operators. Plus it's usually contracted out to some huge corporation (privatized from the beginning), and not always a bargain. Let's see what I can find:

ad supported?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1950203,00.asp

ACLU not very excited about it:
http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/08/aclu_sfnetwork/

fun in New York:
http://www.freepress.net/news/20677

PPP in Minneapolis:
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=2303

There's lots more out there. The goal is nice, but getting there is complicated, and dangerous to the taxpayers. Be careful Vancouver!

The porn numbers are way off

According a published report , the high estimate is about 1%.

Someone did an estimate based on the content in the alt.binaries newsgroups back in the mid-90's and came up with the 80% number. That's when the urban legend was started.

early printing of porn

much of the works have been destroyed, as they were considered heresy by the church, especially if they were done by presses that had been used to create bibles. The publishers faced death threats from the oligopic church ~ yet the demand and potential profit was worth the risk!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_erotic_depictions

Others consider the pressures on tech to be driven partly by porn and the profits to be made:

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/pornsecrethistory.php

There are also compelling arguments to be made to not get into the censorship of any net materials:

http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v49/no1/johnson.html

ultimately straight dope tries to give an answer to this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051007.html

Thanks Foley

I thought that 'vast majority' had to be a long way from desccribing the actual situation.

No - the 1 % porn content is

No - the 1 % porn content is nonsense. Anyone with eyes and an internet connection can tell you that. Percentage of web pages (or URL domain names) is NOT percentage of content. The majority of it is porn - no urban myth there.

murdock - the biggest patron of erotica (historically) has been the Church. Virtually all of our post-Greco-Roman, pre-20th century, pre-Playboy erotic cultural references were bought and paid for by the Church. They practically bankrolled Western sexuality.

Sorry to shatter your pre-programmed anti-Christian po-mo liberal-Left prejudices.

Lets face it

My bill to Telus for high speed Internet service is around $38.00 per month.
Now, if I could access a free WIFI Internet service, that would save me about $2,500.00 over the next five years.
That is a significant amount of money when you multiply it by one million BC citizens.
That is 2.5 Billion dollars saved by BC citizens over 5 years.
What would we do with that amount of money?
I suspect we would spend it. On family, drugs, cars, appliances, home improvements.
I don't think Telus/ Shaw/ Bell/ Rogers/ would be happy with the CRTC for allowing this.
Let all of us fight for this free internet access for all. ( at least those in major urban areas )
Good luck, unless we get rid of the CRTC. Which means vote CPC.
The ball is in our court to support this initiative to provide us with free access to the net. ( Y2Kyoto )

Why do I bother reading Tyee?

Did I miss something or did that article manage to waste a page of text on an important topic without actually saying anything useful? (except perhaps that we need to be really careful not to offend the telecoms and cablecos who now monopolize our access to the internet) and were the few interesting responses not overwhelmed by the debate about the relationship between mediaeval christianity and pornography in response to someone's throwing out an unfounded "statistic" that he might as well have read on a washroom wall?
Perhaps I should give up on reading this thing.

A question worth reviewing...

alqpr, I have at times wondered at the direction of comments in the after article section.

The right way to view it is like a few seats at the bar in a pub, the faces change but the conversation can become rambling at times.

The points raised about porn content speak to a certain part of this issue, namely the tracking of child porn users and potentially child molesters. In a Wi-Fi environment it is harder to track them, not impossible, just harder. Thus the reason for the commentary leading to discussion of porn content on the net. The amount out there is immaterial anyway, as there might be only one site, but if billions visit it for the content then is not that the number to be measured?

My original point about the early time of the printing press still stands, and yes many pornographic books were printed for church consumption, but then they are works of art ~ right?

Yes and no - I can't recall

Yes and no - I can't recall examples of "many pornographic books" produced for church consumption. As for the visual arts, Western religious authorities have historically exerted a highly fruitful patronage over what was later labelled as 'pornography'. Most of this material emerged from the Renaissance era. And it's almost all 'High Art'. I think there are very interesting reasons for this interrelationship.

Prior to that, I'd say porn and erotica were still primarily for the literate and upper classes. For example, the wall murals in the brothels of Pompey and elsewhere would have required money to hire skilled artisans, and lots of work. And books and poetry were for small-scale elite consumption, inaccessible to a largely illiterate public, and far too rare and expensive on top of that.

It would be interesting to see reliable recent statistics on internet content. I don't find the 1% figure to be credible in the slightest.

As I said, content is only one side of that issue - usage is another one. All of these are relevant considerations when debating whether cash-strapped urban jurisdictions should divert funds from other priorities in order to subsize a city-wide wi-fi zone.

Free internet

Free access can be had at the library and through the Vancouver Community Network to name two sources off the top of my head. You can get an on-line access for gratis if you're a student as well.

Solutions are already out there... and I don't quite understand why we would want to spend money for better, free access when high-speed is relatively affordable for most working folks.

If you want a free ride, it's a bit precious to demand a seat in a limo if you ask me.

From Foley's article

``One of the things we think came out of the government's study is that the chance of running into graphic content on the Web when filters are on is extremely low,'' said Catherine Crump, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stark's study found that only 6 percent of all queries returned a sexually explicit Web site, despite the consistent popularity of queries related to sex. It also found that the filters that did the best job blocking sexually explicit content also inadvertently blocked lots of content that was not explicit.

Government witnesses argued that while the percent of sexually explicit Web pages was small, it still amounted to a huge number. ``A lot of sexually explicit material is not blocked by filters,'' Stark wrote in the conclusion to his study.

Attorneys for the Justice Department were not available for comment Monday afternoon.

The 8-year-old lawsuit ignited widespread public debate last year after Google objected to a subpoena it had received to turn over billions of Web site addresses and two months of search queries to government attorneys. Google argued in federal court that the request would put both the private queries of Google users and the Mountain View giant's trade secrets at risk.

A federal judge subsequently ordered Google to turn over 50,000 random copies of Web pages from its index, but did not require Google to produce search-engine queries. Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo provided a sample of 1 million Web sites. MSN, Yahoo and AOL also provided a week of search queries.

Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and civil-liberties activist, said Google's stance was ``horribly self-serving.''

``There were no privacy implications in the sense that the data was restricted to a very small set of researchers who were under various sets of protective orders,'' Finkelstein said.

Finkelstein said Stark's findings about the prevalence of pornography on the Internet are similar to other academic studies.

``What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that the Internet is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general.''

I still say your 'vast majority' is a very long way from the truth nightbloom.

How about 6%.

the internet as porn

Not as in "info-porn", which of course nearly all of the internet is. No, it's that debate about how much traffic on the internet is porn or porn-related. I don't have the current stats kicking around here, but Wired Magazine also had juicy bits on it - they specialize in info-porn, or used to - and from what I remember it's well over 50%, could be as high as 90 even, but it's always been that way. Even in the days of AARPNET and UUNET, the same proportion of porn - including textfiles as well as images etc - formed the bulk of the flow/bandwidth, andstill does.

It's not like, as the media sometimes portrays it, "a growing problem". It has its own inertia and is only growing in the same way the internet itself is; and proportionately at that. And as Wired or any good internet history can tell you, it's the porn industry that's driven nearly all of the advances in bandwidth technology such as mpg/mp3 and jpg compression, as well as HTML/XML features, and also pioneered PayPal and other internet financial systems. "They" (pornmongering websites) were also one of the first parts - the first part of the net - that started showing tangible profits and revenues (as opposed to dot.com "I'll give you twenty million for that napkin you scratched some ideas out on" which is how hotmail got started...for more than 20 mil though).

The prissiness in news coverage about the net is always interesting/fun. Terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, etc "make the internet a dangerous place" and the "oh, my!" flavour of the hands-raised-in-alarm porn reporting strikes me as church ladies on a rampage. If it weren't for porn, there never would have been a public internet; but on the other hand, if it weren't for the military/academic net which preceded the internet, there wouldn't be inernet porn either; because most of that traffic originated and/or was circulated via military and academic servers....

The media always seem so far behind the ball on internet reporting; I think what it is is more like they're misreporting on the competition, and finding whatever they can to dissuade people from using it (unless it's to come to their own site, e.g. canada.com). In the meantime, they push their own menu of violence, drugs and sex and call it "family entertainment".

Gwest said: Quote:I still

Gwest said:

Possibly - I'm willing to be convinced. I wasn't being disengenuous - I honestly believe that the vast majority of internet material (bite for bite) is visual pornography.
It's inaccurate to simply tally web pages or domain names. But to be perfectly clear, let me re-interate now that I have nothing against pornography per se.

The two segments you bolded in your post above require interpretation. If I understand correctly, the first bolded statement describes the testing of filters, which failed to filter out all pornographic material. The 6% refers to material that seeped through the filter being tested, not to the content of the World Wide Web at large.

The second bolded statement is purely subjective. The speaker is projecting assumptions pertaining to people's collective sexual nature, as if that were possible. The incidence of pornography (and the style of pornography) is not necessarily indicative of sexual tastes in the general population. The incidence and style is an expression of commercial interest, first and foremost. It reflects principally the tastes of those people (mostly men) willing to pay for access.

I still thing that if we could add up the entire deposit of material on the WWW and categorize the content by amount of memory space consumed, then we would observe that pornography in fact consumes much of the internet pie.

Clarification

The second bolded statement is purely subjective.
Of course it is. Then so was your phrase 'vast majority'. After all, that was the only real point to the matter.

Skookum1's observations are interesting, and something I wasn't aware of...(relative to the role of pornography as a goad to technical advance) but then, half the time I can't get the few bits of UTube video I'd like to watch to work on my computer.

As for measuring that memory archive, size - as in so many cases - is a poor measure of real value. Project Gutenberg, among others, seems to me to actually dwarf in both taste and value whatever it is folks are willing to 'pay' to see on their home computer screen.

I'd bet that the few people who buy skin mags still have enormous piles of them and that, mutatis mutandis, it is exactly the same few people who're responsible for 'using' the vast majority of porn on the internet. Just a little exercise in clarity.

Few people...? Do you

Few people...? Do you really believe that?

I refrained from commenting on the Little Sisters thread that the only way a specialty bookshop like that is able to stay afloat is because of the revenues generated by their mass porn sales. Not that there's anything wrong with that...But my point is that there's far more consumption of pornography than meets the naked eye.

I guess I circulate in different cirlces

Yes, nightbloom, I do believe that. I think there's a small network of folks for whom pornography is their only interest and I think that for them it consumes virtually ALL their time and, sadly, almost all their resources. Often much of their potential as well.

I have a feeling you're travelling with the wrong crowd. Also, happily, most well-adjusted folks quickly learn what a dead end porn is, all on their own.

And, on the other point, as to the need for omnipresent wi-fi networks; well I'd say they're about equally important as the need for someone to talk on their cellphone in the middle of busy traffic.

Beside the p0Rn

There is lots of porn on the net. Telus and Shaw and even the dimwits at the CRTC know this. So what?

The interesting element of WiFi or other wireless technologies is that TheTyee will be available to people on the bus. With video.

This will not make our dear friends at CanWest very happy.

It will enable podcast/video casting. Streaming audio. You too can be your own private radio station.

Bye Bye 'NW. (As well as the silliness known as satellite radio.)

The child pornsters are not about technology save that they will ooze into any technology available. Which is not an argument against that technology.

At the same time - why should the city or the province or anyone else finance this? There are plenty of potential private sector suppliers who should be allowed to compete. Most will go bust, some will succeed. No public money will be spent. Ain't capitalism grand!

Ain't capitalism grand!

NOPE

Gwest said: Quote:I think

Gwest said:

Gwest, you're right, in that there's a minority of men who have have channeled the affective aspect of their lives almost entirely through pornography. For them, the need for visual stimulation has become an addicton - a habitual (perhaps compulsive) substitute for real intimacy and personal contact. However, I wouldn't say people like this are 'networked'. Rather, it strikes me as a solitary and self-isolating thing.... unless it involves difficult-to-access contraband like child pornography, which seems to require extensive covert networking (if current headlines are to be taken at face value).

However, this isn't the group I'm talking about. I'm convinced that the vast majority of porn users are fairly average males who use it casually and regularly and (dare I say) constructively - i.e. as an outlet, or as an aid to monogamous behaviour in the context of a healthy intimate relationship with another person.

Obviously, there's a range of opinion on this topic. I won't insist that my views on porn are the only correct ones. Some believe porn does real emotional and cognitive damage to its consumers, and I don't deny that some people take it that far. It's fascinating how the outlook on pornography has changed radically over the past few decades, and that pendulum will likely continue to swing. All the outlooks, if taken non-dogmatically, likely contain a kernel of truth.

Hehe - Do you think? I know I'm in the wrong crowd!

...Oops, I used that phrase

...Oops, I used that phrase "vast majority" again. How 'bout this instead: 'I'm convinced that your average run-of-the-mill consumer of porn...' yada-yada.

Poorly written and poorly

Poorly written and poorly researched article.

His major point on the high cost quotes a business professor not a communication engineer.

In fact,if BC Hydro wanted to offer a mix of wired and wireless internet pipes, all of Vancouver's homes and business' could be wired to 1 gigabit/s for less than $200 a household. Operating costs would be less than $1 a month. This would provide basic cable tv, local telephone access, and internet. The wireless (WIFI) would replace cellular service and allow for portable applications.

Such are the benefits of economies of scale and the several orders of magnitude drop in communication equipment costs in the last few years. No private operator could come close to the order of magnitude savings available to BCHydro by using its existing distribution structure.

Telus and Shaw with their high cost 70's technology are well aware of this and are dumping enormous campaign donations into the pockets of Gordon Campbell's and municipal politician pockets in an effort to shut this down. Apparently, they also bought the services of the Neocon Sun and reporters.

It really peeves me to know I am spending as much money in a month for barely functional telecom services as BC Hydro could charge me one time to provide far better service.

As for the pure WIFI network the cost for the City of Vancouver is estimated at $10 million for 41 sq miles and roughly 300K homes and businesses. Houston is estimating $50 million for 600 sq miles.

Using Vancouver figures this is a cost of $40 per household. I spend that much on telephone every month. WHERE DO I SIGN UP!!!!. Bill me in advance whatever.

As for weak signals for less than $100 you can put up an antenna and wire repeater to distribute through a home or apartment building. This is roughly what you'd pay for a cable modem and router anyway so whats' the beef????

The SUN article on pedophiles was utter nonsense. Only a very stupid pedophile would risk getting nailed with a simple wifi locator when he can surf almost utterly secure using the myriads of proxy servers already available.

wifi security

The Sun article on terrorism related to to WIFI is either another example of poorly researched nonsense or is purposely twisted to appease the paper's Telco advertisers.

No communication engineer in his right mind would put SCADA systems anywhere on a public internet wired or wireless. In fact this is a violation of US National Electric standards.

Terrorist type hackers own large networks of slave computers maintained by Luddites (your mom) with no up to date antivirus and firewall software. They do their dirty deeds from the warmth of their upstairs bedroom not sitting frozen in a wifi equipped van.

The "embedded" reporter is well aware of all this but is catering to the needs of whatever advertiser (guess who) ordered up his article.

amen

good thought seth

I expected more. . .

from this esteemed forum - generally full of well-argued (if not wrong but well-put-forward arguments at least). . . but this fixation with takcking on porn behind every mention of the internet is a really stupid one-two punch that I've really only heard in Canada recently.

Look, porn is an omnimedia phenomenon - it exists in print, video/DVD, phone, etc. Porn will always comprise a percentage of a specific media - and aggregated, it comprises a very large industry. . . but it ain't that big. If porn was so lucrative and comprised the "vast majority" of the internet, then where are the billion dollar online porn companies? Check-out this story:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17033892/site/newsweek/page/1

This isn't my main point - my main point is why do so many people in Vancouver/BC seem to think that the internet is only good for porn, sex criminals or pedophiles? The fact is that people here in BC are afraid of technology. They're afraid of the internet - they don't understand it and they don't trust it. Meanwhile, the rest of the developed world uses the internet as a critical communications medium - doing everything their most sensitive business on the internet, eg. banking. I buy things on the internet, have been since 1996 - never been ripped-off. But I've had my Visa ripped-off twice by some gas station clerk.

I can't believe I'm even writing this in the year 2007. Get with it Nightbloom (I actually respected you before you posted your message about the vast majority of the internet being used for porn) - the internet is a tool like the phone. It's use is varied, valuable and users diverse. And not limited to pedophiles stalking your teens on Myspace - but when that happens it gets media play because it's sensational. . .

And another thing. . .

in a few years, ALL of your media - and I mean ALL of it will be delivered over the internet, or Internet Protocol (IP): cable TV, phone, cellphone, etc.

There's this thing called convergence that's already happening in other parts of the world - but will be much slower coming to Canada - because people here still need to be convinced that "the future is friendly", when in fact the future is simply the future.

I read an old issue of Macleans in my doctor's office a few months ago - and the cover story was titled: "The Internet Sucks" Inside was a feature article about why the internet was bad and did not deliver any value. Only in Canada.

Many of the very same criticisms leveled against the internet are the same as those leveled against similarly disruptive technologies, such as the telephone. Isolates people - no need to meet face to face anymore. How do you trust that the person on the other line is who they say they are? Remember phone sex lines and all those episodes of Oprah about kids who ran-up thousand dollar phone bills dialing-up sex chat lines? People dial 1-800 numbers all the time after watching TV commercials and tell the operator their credit card numbers for Ab machines, 80's pop compilation CD's (mea culpa) and CD's teaching people how to use this new-fangled thing called the internet.

When the next revolutionary communications medium takes hold of the youngsters, even Nightbloom will long for the good ole days when we had iPods, RSS feeds and Youtube instead of being wet-wired into the mega-globo-quantum network with your under-the-skin integrated RFID identity/passport/credit card/driver's license/SIN/Blockbuster card without which you can neither buy nor sell. . .then the rapture.

Quote:I can't believe I'm

I already said (repeatedly) that I don't have anything against porn in principle. The real issue for me is subsizing a medium that supplies it at a time when other municipal public services & infrastructure is in crisis. Can it be justified, and if so can one make the further justification in favour of blanket filters that impact every household?

You're misquoting me. Bite-for-bite, I believe porn consumes more internet space than any other category. 'Vast majority' may have been an overstatement, but the last time I saw an estimate of internet content (admittedly a while ago...prior to blogger, youtube, flickr, and other non-porn content generators) porn took up about 3/4 of the internet.

The only countervailing 'evidence' posted on this thread is an article that makes the ludicrous claim of 1% pornographic content. This is absurd, given that even the 'State of the Filtration Art' still admits 6% porn content through its nets.

Incredulous - check out the

Incredulous - check out the last paragraph of my first post on this thread. I addressed the same convergence of technology which you now mention four days and three feet of thread later.

Clarification

Nightbloom,

I didn't misunderstand you - I know you haven't maligned porn in general - which is enlightened and your subsequent posts repeat this fact. That's not my beef. What I'm taking issue with is the knee-jerk internet=porn position that you so persistently - even now - cling to.

The internet has evolved beyond porn - and your first post re. converged "wireless" box is fine and dandy - but this makes it even more frustrating that you subsequently cite porn as the major driver of the internet, and by doing so, devalue its evolution as the unified communications protocol over which all media will be delivered. Your Luddite position has been compromised. . .

You're focusing on a small part of the internet - if you look at the top 100 websites by traffic in Canada tracked by Alexa - the only site that might qualify as porn is "Adultfriendfinder" - which is more of a dating site, albeit for the purposes of sex:

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=CA&ts_mode=country&lang=none

Go to the Global 500 and you'll see much of the same.

I've seen your arguments in other threads on other topics where you take issue with people generalizing the bible as full of sex and violence, or Christianity causing the world's ills. Same thing here - stop being so stubborn - you yourself admit that you saw some stats a few years ago. . . in internet time, given its rapid growth, that's a long time. Time to get up to date.

You're better than this Nightbloom.

indredulous - I don't see my

indredulous - I don't see my position on internet technology and internet content as particularly Luddite. I'm all for it. Ditto porn. I also don't have any strong issues against making wi-fi a subsidized service - I'm just making conversation.

Measuring top 100 websites doesn't moot my point. You can't measure this properly by simply tallying domain names. I'm talking quantitative web content. If someone can show me a pie-graph illustrating that porn occupies less internet memory/storage space than any other category of material, then I'll gladly revise my views. I don't feel particularly strongly about this issue either way.

Telus pulls porn plug

I just heard that Telus, bowing to religious leader pressures, cancelled contracts, etc has cancelled plans for porn downloads onto wireless devices.

security & privacy?

If anything Internet related is going to be publically subsidized, my top concern would be for the public's information security and privacy, whatever the particular mode of connection used. WiFi is not easily made secure, in my vastly amateur understanding.

As a person and student researcher who once felt at "One" with my trusted Windows98 computer up to a few years ago, you could almost call me a Cyberphobe these days. My current research on computer troubles points to corrupt technicians loading surveillance and data mining programs onto my machine, consequent sabotage of computer access and operations including use of the printer, internet connections, control over the entire machine. Too many on-line courses I've had to to drop out of now to trust any more education courses on the Net. Meanwhile its getting pushed ever-more down our throats (no porn pun intended!)

Motivations? Money first ( re various private and government funded pyramid/research schemes rewarding technologist-controlled geographic "service" areas for covert data feeds). Then Political sabotage (don't think Bush is the only one doing unlawful surveillance of citizens). Then there are the plain small-town bullies, the good ol' boys Masonic network operating "in plain view", like fake software, in every town all over the continent.

By the way, isn't "ALEXA" a spyware dumping site? People should also look up dastardly ROOTKITS and Microsoft's self-professed Techno-evangelists aka INET. There's a new group located at BCIT.

The Future is Fake, as far as virtuality is concerned. See Plato's parable of the Cave.