NICOSIA, Cyprus – Always looking for ways to help users conceal their pornographic activities from the prying eyes of employers, spouses, roommates, neighbors, prison guards and/or teachers, xHamster recently announced the launch of a private “Night Mode,” which allows site members to switch the site to “a low-light background.”
“xHamster fans deserve privacy when they’re watching, uploading or chatting,” said Alex Hawkins, xHamster’s vice president. “We know most of our users visit the site late at night, and too many porn sites light up the room when you log on. We believe that if you’re watching a cuckold stepmom gangbang at 2 a.m., it’s nobody’s business but your own!”
This is fantastic and all, but I have a question: Won’t the videos still produce light? If the answer to that question is “no,” then my follow-up question is why isn’t the bigger story here xHamster’s new technology that enables viewers to enjoy pitch-black porn?
Now that I think of it, all sorts of questions come to mind, especially given some of the site’s other recent innovations, or planned ones, like minimeyes.
“minimeyes is a specially designed motion sensor that immediately closes your browser windows and turns off the sound the second someone approaches your desk,” an xHamster spokesperson explained in May. “No more scrambling with the mouse or trackpad; no more suspicious lovers sneaking up on you from behind. As soon as minimeyes identifies an intruder — BOOM! — the porn disappears.”
OK, but if I’m watching invisible porn, what’s disappearing? Won’t it look suspicious for me to be sitting there with nothing but a low-light background rendition of the xHamster members’ area on my laptop’s display?
What if the person who is trying to catch me while watching porn is using some advanced technology of their own, like an invisibility cloak, or maybe a remote-controlled robot that can sneak in at floor level like the ones used by police bomb squads?
For that matter, if my “roommate, girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, sister, boss or, worse yet, grandma” is really interested in figuring out whether I’m watching porn, can’t they just install a remote invisible keylogger device to catch me, even without walking in on me while I’m in the act?
In a sense, the battle between clandestine porn watchers and those who would catch them is an arms race, just like the one America had with the USSR during the Cold War, only with less effective age-verification methods. While I appreciate xHamster’s efforts to give porn watchers another tool for their tawdry, sinful arsenal, it seems to me Night Mode is at least one step behind the competition — or two steps, when the competition isn’t my grandma but the National Security Administration.
Speaking of the NSA, were I in charge of the place I’d be out there right now marketing a consumer version of PRISM. They could use a tagline like “If it can spy on Angela Merkel’s cellphone, it can certainly tell you if your grandson is watching internet porn — even in Night Mode!”
Thankfully, for those of you who want to watch porn in peace without having to use a dark-background site, watch invisible videos or lock the freaking door to the bathroom, there are other options available. Chief among them is moving into your own goddamn apartment so you don’t have to crib grandma’s WiFi to access tube sites.
Of course, not every porn viewer can afford his or her own place, and some moms don’t have a basement in which their adult progeny can get the privacy necessitated by their pornographic compulsions.
The good news is even indigent porn fans still have safe spaces where they can watch porn to their heart’s content, free of worry from mom, grandma or their spouse walking in. Unless, of course, their spouse happens to be a librarian.
