Porn's new platforms

By "platforms" I mean video players, music players, phones, gameplayers - and this is all over tech news this week. Parents who care about this need to know. One porn publisher told the Washington Post that his industry's Web business had peaked a couple of years ago, so there's great interest in moving onto new, more portable platforms. Of course, because of the iPod's popularity, much of the news focuses on that (it took 20 days from the day videos became available for iTunes to reach 1 million video downloads), but the Post looks at the big picture. Besides video iPods, there's the everywhere news of porn and parental controls on phones (see last week). And last July, I linked to Newsweek reporting that Japanese adult-DVD makers H.M.P. and GLAY'z had joined Playboy on the Playstation Portable gameplayer. The PSP does have parental controls. Here's a post about them at PSPJunkies.com: "With those porn coming out, the GTA ["Hot Coffee" mod] scandal, if I was a parent, I'd freak with real scary thoughts of having my 10-year-old having hands on the Sony PSP. With the 2.0 firmware update, under Security Settings, a concerned parent can set up the Parental Controls to stop little kiddies playing that R-rated stuff not meant for them. To set it up (or un-set it), the password is 0000, and turn it on as you like. This is a community service from PSPJunkies making the Sony PSP a safer device. :)" [Of course, there's a workaround detailed at PSPHacks.net, which someone not much over 10 could easily find.] Of course, the Web is far from passe, especially on the amateur front - for example, "vlogs" (video blogs) are taking off, with tech startups offering "tools that make it easy to create, distribute, and monetize homemade content," Red Herring reports.