A lecture was supposed to be held on this study but was cancelled at the last minute by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences citing "connotations with gender studies".
More info here: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Readit Newsturnitoff commented on Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken dev.to/jwoertink/programm... · Posted by u/gf-nl
Your assertion regarding adult CNP risk is incorrect, they do in fact have much higher levels of fraud and chargebacks. The card networks came down on this category because of chargebacks, not because porn is bad.
I would also point out Adult CNP is far from the only category to get this treatment, but they are one of the only high risk categories that have four major banks more than happy to take their business. Travel sites, dating sites, and other high risk CNP merchants don’t have the same benefit.
The techniques described in this article are exactly why issuers block transactions. Merchants are trying to force transactions that are likely to be charged back by engaging in increasingly elaborate, and likely illegal, schemes.
If you’re operating a legitimate adult CNP site, there are plenty of options available to you and the adult-focused processors will hold your hand through rejecting sketchy charges even if it means lower up front revenues.
I have seen bad actors open up fake porn sites to obtain processing for their illegal activities because adult processing for legitimate sites is that available.
Edit:typos
Exactly this. Adult and high risk in general are an absolute quagmire, and all actors are trying to "outcompete" with one another, making the situation worse and worse.
Risk from transactions: stolen credit cards get default checked on adult sites (digital good delivery instantly verifies if the card is still useable).
Bad faith merchants. This goes from outright scams to the still widely used practice of "card banging", when they tack on added services or hit you with a huge fee after your free trial ends (which is not presented to the customer).
Affiliates screwing sites, sites screwing affiliates.
Billing support building more and more barriers for customers to get a hold of them or to cancel subscriptions.
And then let's not even get into the industry's backbone, content producers...
turnitoff commented on Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags craphound.com/news/2018/0... · Posted by u/laurex
" [..] given enough surveillance, companies can sell us anything: Brexit, Trump, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and successful election bids for absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban."
The same as the author, I have serious problems believing this but it has become a common place now even in mainstream media.
In a way, I worry more about this, than about the others dangers that we can read in the article (I agree with those also).
It seems that, now, whenever people vote for somebody or something that they are not "suppose" to vote, they have been "manipulated" and it's the fault of Russian bots.
I'm not saying that, like always, there are not forces in play trying to move things their way, but I find worrisome how easily that narrative is accepted. It's a kind of mainstream paranoia conspiracy or, maybe, a too convenient excuse for not finding the real reasons why people feel disgruntled.
I mean, it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it? We know that this sort of manipulation is going on in an organized way: Sybil attacks are pretty common in politics.
But it's insidious precisely because of this Patomkin-effect: it makes it unclear how many real supporters the issue has, and it gives an easy cop-out for people who would be otherwise responsible for their own defeat.
In a way, it becomes a scapegoat that can unite friend and foe.
(Although I think Doctorow is steering clear from the very stupid interpretation of this effect)
I used to work for a payment processor. Our upstream bank would not allow us to handle any adult content at all. The justification used is that adult content is too risky because of chargeback rates.
Apparently the chargeback rates on adult content is really high. Anecdotally, it makes sense. You buy the nude pics, your husband sees the charge on your card, "I was hacked" boom, chargeback. You buy the nude pics, do the nasty alone in your room, have some regrets once the pressure to do the nasty is gone, try to get a refund, get refused, boom chargeback.
I'm not sure that quite holds up in our post-Pornhub world, where everyone is openly admitting to using porn these days. But banks are conservative (in all the ways) and slow to change.
That's not the real reason (source: used to work in adult).
High chargebacks in high-risk industries are related to three things:
1) The goods are digital and delivered immediately. This means that if I just got a hold of a 100 stolen CC numbers and want to test whether or not they're legit before moving on to physical goods, I'm going to test them out at one such service - which shoots up the CB/refund rate.
2) This also creates a secondary market for illicitly opened accounts / access, which is easy money (and anything else you can imagine down the lane on piracy etc.)
3) Because the margins are so low due to high marketing costs + competition, many sites (especially in the past) would sign the user up to endless recurring billing schemes which are nigh impossible (or costly) to cancel, also driving up the chargeback rate.
There is a thing called "process debt", in the same way as technical debt, that some things are done manually. This can be mundane routine work, that might be up to 80% easy to automate, but allows for oversight and flexibility and often works with systems that are not trivial to work with. Other times the manual process is just cheaper to maintain than it is to invest in a "good enough" automation. You can also follow this by looking at the practice of offshoring and the amount of automation invested into offshored service centers (who benefit most from these solutions via specialization and scaling).
So even if the company hires a goddamn genius, if you want to automate stuff without breaking existing flows, you need quite a few months of understanding of the environment and the real needs of the process (business wise as well), etc.
And that's why managers think it's a joke idea.
(And it also comes off as extremely arrogant, because it's essentially calling your coworkers stupid by saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!")