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splices them back together. In addition, few people back then had enough hardware overhead to store, manipulate, and display those images.

A lot has changed. The same systems (Altavista, Yahoo!, Hotbot) that make it easy to find the ninety-two pages that mention your own name also make it easy to search on words associated with pornography (try "sexxxy"). We still don't have systems that can take descriptions like "naked women with big tits" and return matching photographs (although it's probably only a matter of time), but since humans tend to behave in stereotypical patterns, it's relatively easy to guess what words might figure in any text lurking near the photographs and pull up enough hits to scare Hugh Hefner.[7] But here again, the text may not match the pictures, and most links only lead to the front doors of commercial Web sites, which typically give you just a few samples before demanding your credit card.

At the same time, today's new generation of Net users generally aren't using those arcane UNIX tools; they're doing everything through a Web browser, including reading news, and the browsers have decoding and splicing facilities built right into them. For a substantial percentage of today's users, to click on a binary posting is to see it displayed. The next generation of services, real-time live video, is already beginning to appear, and it's even easier: hand in a credit card number and sit back and watch a small, grainy, live strip show.

Those changes aside, it is nonetheless true that many journalists have made the mistake of estimating how much pornography there is online based on the results of text searches, and then have written influential diatribes about the dangers of the Net. Two examples, among many, are Time magazine's July 3, 1995, cover story, "Cyberporn," and the London-based tabloid News of the World's "exposé" of sex online in 1990, which focused on the CIX conferencing system. The CIX story was laughable to anyone who knows the system, as it singled out two conferences from among thousands, shredding in the process one of London's senior computer journalists, a married man with two daughters. Named as a moderator of one of these two sex-related conferences (he moderates tens of others besides), he had bricks thrown through the windows of his house.

The Time story, which arguably helped influence the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), relied heavily on a badly flawed and quickly discredited study called "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway" by Martin Rimm,[8] then a thirty-year-old undergraduate student in electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. Rimm's analysis of 917,410 items, found primarily on commercial adult BBSs and, he said, representing 8.5 million downloads,[9] led him to claim, among other things, that 83.5 percent of images posted to Usenet were pornographic, and that pornographers were using transaction logs to compile sophisticated databases of user preferences to determine which type of images to market more aggressively.

Rimm's study was immediately widely criticized both on Usenet and, especially, on the WELL, where a jury of writers and experts, led by Vanderbilt University marketing professor Donna Hoffman and Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff) general counsel Mike Godwin, confronted Time's reporter, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, with a startlingly well-researched critique of the article, the Rimm study, and Rimm's background in less than a week. The story made it into Congress even faster, however: The same day it hit the stands, it was quoted in the Senate as evidence that the Net needed regulation. The WELL discussion eventually pushed Elmer-DeWitt into writing a full-page partial recantation acknowledging that the study had "damaging flaws."[10] These are worth going into, because the Time story is still being quoted by politicians and would-be regulators, and because there are so many misperceptions about pornography on the Net.

Hoffman, whose academic background is in behavioral statistics, and her partner, Thomas P. Novak, both associate professors at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, wrote a paper listing the major flaws in Rimm's work, based on the extensive WELL analysis .[11] First and foremost, they wrote, the study was not peer-reviewed, normally considered vital authentication for any scientific study. Instead,