sex

Sex.com sells--for $13 million, that is.

Placed on the auction block in July, the potentially valuable domain name has been scooped up by Clover Holdings from Escom for a cool $13 million. Escom put Sex.com up for sale after declaring bankruptcy earlier this year.

Though it swooped in with the winning bid, Clover can't officially claim ownership until the sale is approved by the bankruptcy court overseeing Escom. This is expected to happen on Wednesday. Not much is known about Sex.com's new owner. BBC News describes it as an obscure company registered on the Caribbean … Read more

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Apple announces a new lineup of MacBook Airs, updated iLife, and FaceTime for Macs.

The Boxee Box is set to launch on November 10.

Verizon is going to start selling the Samsung Galaxy Tab on November 11.

Google Docs now supports drag and drop into documents.

Facebook helps you stop stalking your ex by blocking you from their profile.

Netflix may offer a streaming-only subscription in the U.S.

I am sure that, when creating Web sites, people still think long, hard, and late into the night about the URL behind which they will stand.

In the case of one organization, perhaps it thought too long, too hard, and far too late into the night.

The National Schools Film Week is the "world's largest festival for cinema and young people." Its home page has a very interesting picture of many children wearing dark glasses. Perhaps they are 3D. Perhaps it's because the URL of the National Schools Film Week is, you got there, didn't … Read more

It's all over the Internet.

That's the phrase that is increasingly being used to describe when a matter has become one of importance.

This week, the matter of importance concerns a Duke University graduate who decided to create a compendium of her sexual experiences with various men while at Duke.

Who knows why she decided to do it in PowerPoint? Perhaps she thought that one day she might present it to a symposium of intellectuals. It was, indeed, entitled: "An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics."

Within it, she described her … Read more

Men are misunderstood.

The media, Hollywood, and various other pressure groups have painted them as feral beasts, moved to action and emotion only by the prospect of their target gender's proximity.

Two enterprising tech beings--men, as it happens--decided at South by Southwest Interactive to further this perception of male neanderthalia. Jeff Hodsdon and Danny Trinh, then both at Digg, created a service that collated all those useful Foursquare check-ins in order to inform those who might be interested of the volume of women in any one place.

They did it as a joke. They were mocking all the … Read more

I am always suspicious that those who design surveys are looking for particular, amusing answers.

So I am delighted that those who designed a gadget-conscious study for PC Tools chose to offer respondents some very cerebral choices.

Essentially, PC Tools was looking to see just how deeply the need to be plugged in online had penetrated human psyches. So they willfully probed into scenarios from which others might have shied, which, coincidentally made for a searing analysis into the state of the American nation.

Here is the state of society, neatly encapsulated in one single finding: more people believe that … Read more

A hundred organizations fighting sex trafficking have joined the chorus of voices asking Craigslist to remove its erotic services section worldwide as the company has in the U.S.

In a letter sent Tuesday (PDF) to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, human rights groups throughout the world thanked the company for bringing down its adult and erotic ads in the U.S. But the groups said that these services, where trafficked children and women are sold for sex, remain open in 250 cities worldwide. And in not making the same improvements globally, the groups told Craigslist that … Read more

Is this the final capitulation?

After the mysterious disappearance of its Adult Services section, Craigslist uttered a symbolic protest by replacing it with a black bar that read "censored" in white type.

Wednesday, however, even that black bar was gone. Any sense that Craigslist was protesting at its manhandling by the combined forces of 17 attorneys general has now been entirely removed, leaving only the memories of nights of promise and days of satisfaction.

Despite the protests of former sex workers and esteemed academics, it seems that Craigslist has, indeed, given up on its Adult Services section for … Read more

The strangest massage I ever had consisted of the spa masseuse waving her hands all over my body, supposedly sending positive energy its way, without ever touching it.

Some are speculating that Craigslist, having removed its Adult Services section without explanation, is performing a similar sort of energy transfer.

Craigslist has remained entirely tight-lipped about the insertion of the word "CENSORED" where its Adult Services used to be. Yet some wonder whether Craigslist might be trying to prove that closing the section will merely encourage those who place ads for prostitution to use another of Craigslist's sections- … Read more