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A man who admitted illegally using credit card information of about 900,000 people to sign them up for pornographic Web sites was sentenced Monday to more than 11 years in prison. Kenneth H. Taves, 52, was also ordered to pay restitution for the scheme, which prosecutors estimated netted him $37.5 million. About $12.8 million has been recovered, and another $8.1 million is believed to be in banks in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. The rest of the money has not been found, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Brent Whittlesey. Taves, of Malibu, ran a business called NetFill that provided access...

Congress weighs placing X-rated e-labels on Web porn BY J. SCOTT ORR WASHINGTON -- Tucked away in a spending bill pending in Congress is language the porn industry finds offensive. Along with billions of dollars in funding for the Justice Department and the State Department is a little-noticed provision that would require Web sites that feature "sexually explicit" content to contain special labels to make it easier to keep kids away from them. The provision's backers -- led by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- say the language is a simple and logical step to keep kids a safe distance from...

Internet access for the public at the Mount Clemens Public Library has been revoked because of an increase in the number of people looking at sexually explicit material. Advertisement The plug was pulled on the computers earlier this month after employees noticed a "large increase" in visitors using the free Internet service to access what the library termed obscene material in violation of library policies. "There seemed to be a sudden increase in that kind of activity, and it was really bothering me. I thought something needed to be done," said library Director Donald E. Worrell Jr. Library staffers acknowledge...

ON THE TV screen, the two naked young women writhe together to the sounds of Hotel California as the occasional crackle of gunfire punctuates the Afghan night.Several overseas phone numbers offer an intimate chat with the ladies, or with some of their equally outgoing friends. The heaviest fighting in five years has slowed reconstruction to a crawl in the deserts and oases of Kandahar, where the strict Taleban movement began in 1994, but pornography, opium and illegal alcohol are flourishing, officials say. At least one satellite operator offers foreign channels such as eurotictv, allsex, 247Sex and transex, along with the...

Thai zoo to use videos to teach panda to mate Nov. 11, 2006. 07:34 AM REUTERS BANGKOK ? A Thai zoo, which has hosted a couple of pandas for four years, will play "porn" videos for the male next month to encourage them to breed in captivity, the project manager said on Saturday. The pair ? living chastely together at the zoo in the northern city of Chiang Mai since arriving from China in 2003 ? would be separated in December, but stay close enough for occasional glimpses of each other, said panda project chief Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee. "They don't know...

A Bridgewater man was arrested Monday for breaking into the township library to download and watch pornography, police said. Township police said Carlos Wilfrido Paucar-Zhagul forcibly entered the Tewksbury Township Public Library through a back door, pulled down the shades and accessed the computers. Police arrested him at 11:10 p.m. Surveillance footage shows Paucar-Zhagul, 25, of Bridgewater, N.J., in the library while it was closed to the public, police said. A few weeks before the arrest, library staff complained someone had been entering the library during off hours, pulling down the shades and downloading pornography. The computers were infected with...

(WCCO) Minneapolis On March 30, Minnesota Timberwolves center Eddie Griffin was drunk and masturbating when he crashed his luxury SUV into a parked Suburban outside a store in Minneapolis, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the man whose Suburban was hit in the crash. The WCCO-TV I-TEAM obtained copies of 911 calls and store surveillance video of the incident, along with an accident report the police submitted to the state. Several of the 911 callers that night said Griffin was drunk. One witness said Griffin told him he was watching pornography in a DVD player mounted on the dashboard...

LONDON: Fourteen staff at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Wales have been sacked and 101 disciplined after they swapped so many pornographic emails that it affected the organisation's mainframe computer. The action was taken after a three-month inquiry into the controversy. The 14 employees, including one higher executive officer, were dismissed for sending obscene emails to people outside the agency. The others, who were given various degrees of reprimand including final warnings, had sent the material to colleagues within the building. The agency, which has 6000 staff, handles all of Britain's driver and vehicle records. A spokeswoman said...

Erotic images elicit faster and stronger electrical responses in a woman's brain than do images of any other sort. The finding might not sound groundbreaking, but researchers did not expect such rapid responses to erotic images, which seem to involve different circuits than the processing of other images.

LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood has been tiptoeing its way toward letting consumers buy a movie online, burn it onto a DVD and watch it on a living-room TV. While the studios hesitate, the adult film industry is taking the leap. Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer. It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat. "Leave...

Millions of men and boys are falling for the destructive myth that looking at "adult" porn is normal, healthy and harmless for "regular guys." Way too many are finding themselves handcuffed between two cops, under arrest for sexual conduct with a kid. The hook-ups with kids are occurring on the main streets of U.S. cities and the dark alleys of the virtual world. Experts estimate that 50,000 sexual predators prowl the Internet for children every day. As long as myth trumps truth, the next estimate could be 10 times what it is today. Stopping predators before they ravage our...

Actors having real sex in art-house movies. Erstwhile child star Lindsay Lohan appearing barely clad on the cover of her new album. Teenage girls strolling down Main Street USA attired in ''Porn Star" T-shirts. A bikini-wearing Jessica Simpson bumping and grinding in the music video for ''These Boots Are Made for Walkin.' " College-age women flashing for the ''Girls Gone Wild" video series with nonchalant exhibitionism. Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured...

Cameras whirred and fans pressed 10 deep against a velvet rope in Las Vegas to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars sashaying into one of the first entertainment awards shows of the year. As at any Hollywood awards ceremony, photographers asked the performers to twirl and pose, and reporters stationed along the red carpet begged for quips about the next project or the state of the industry. But unlike the Golden Globes and Emmys, the goody bag contained "Barely Legal" playing cards and Hustler condoms, and the stars such as Arnold Schwartzenpecker and Britney Rears were not quite household...

The world's most famous men's magazine has begun offering "Playboy bodcasts" from its Web site for download and viewing on portable devices such as Apple's iPod. The free video clips available for download include Playboy big dog Hugh Hefner dispensing "wit and wisdom" and Playmates cracking jokes and offering love advice. A Playboy spokesperson said the free downloads are rated PG, but the company plans to offer "sexier" premium content in the future.

RIYADH, 2 October 2005 — Of the estimated 2.2 million Internet users in the Kingdom, the majority regularly try to access forbidden or indecent material, Arab News has learned. “Of those who log on to the Internet, 92.5 percent are trying to access a website that, for one reason or another, has been blocked,” said Dr. Mishaal Al-Kadhi, acting general manager of the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). KACST is not only the Internet gateway for the Kingdom but also acts as a filter for unsuitable material. The official said that pornographic material was one of...

In two papers presented to the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Scotland today, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs announced the first reported transmissions of 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) Ethernet over optical. Bell Labs says these results are a significant milestone in the industry's march towards migrating to 100Gb/s data networking. "This work is a major first. We have broken through the ceiling in transmission rates and described two techniques that could help implement 100G Ethernet over optical systems," said Martin Zirngibl, director, Bell Labs. "With more and more enterprises moving to 10Gb/s transmission, carriers are looking...

Porno shoot uncovered at 21st century's first World Expo Fri Sep 2,10:11 AM ET TOKYO (AFP) - Five people have been questioned for allegedly shooting footage for a pornographic film inside a cable car at the World Exposition, a showcase of technology underway in Japan, police said. The five suspects, who include an actress, could get up to 30 days in jail or a fine of up to 10,000 yen (91 dollars) for indecent exposure, police said. "An actress exposed her upper body and an actor touched it inside a gondola in the one-minute scene," said a police spokesman in...

SAN FRANCISCO -- There will soon be a new way to read the articles in Playboy -- oh, and to see the pictures, too. The magazine is going digital. Playboy Enterprises said the digital version will be identical to the print edition. Chief Executive Christie Hefner called it a natural extension of the Playboy brand. She said giving Playboy increased distribution and worldwide access over the Web will also boost its advertisers' reach. The digital edition will make its debut Sept. 13, the same day the October issue's print version appears on newsstands.

A Democratic lawmaker plans to propose a new 25 percent federal tax on Internet pornography and new requirements for adult Web sites to help prevent children from looking at them. The bill, expected to be introduced in the Senate next week by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., would impose the excise tax on transactions with for-profit adult Web sites, which typically sell monthly subscriptions to Internet users to look at pornographic photographs or videos. Money collected from the tax would be used for law enforcement and for protecting children from crimes involving the Internet. Lincoln's spokesman, Drew Goesl, would not discuss...

Police in India's eastern state of Orissa rounded up about 200 people watching a porn movie in a cinema hall and made them do 10 sit-ups in public as punishment, the Hindustan Times reported. The paper said parents of teenagers under 17 caught in the net were ordered to watch the punishment, while all the culprits were made to take a public vow never to watch a sleazy movie again. Sanjeev Panda, police chief in the Balasore district where the movie was being shown, said he was trying a new approach in a bid to stop the screening of pornography,...