1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

they note, it was embargoed for six months before its publication in a (non-peer reviewed) law journal and its use by Time as the basis for the "Cyberporn" story. Many of Rimm's statements, they went on, were unsubstantiated. Methodological flaws made it difficult to determine exactly what Rimm did in carrying out his study, rendering his results difficult or impossible to replicate; replication of results is the basis of the scientific method by which we build, painfully, our store of common knowledge. Further, data were misinterpreted; Rimm's definition of "pornography" was not consistent; there was confusion between the readership of Usenet at one university and readership worldwide; there was confusion between Usenet, the World - Wide Web, the sixty-eight adult BBSs he claimed to have actually surveyed, and the Information Superhighway. Finally, they questioned where Rimm derived his assertion about those databases of user preferences the porn merchants were said to be compiling from transaction analysis.

Hoffman and Novak also pointed out that Time's reporting failed to note its own inconsistencies: the article reported that "only about 3 percent of all the messages on the Usenet newsgroups [represent pornographic images], while the Usenet itself represents 11.5 percent of the traffic on the Internet," but then did not draw the logical conclusion that less than 0.5 percent (3 percent of 11 percent) of the messages on the Internet are associated with newsgroups that contain pornographic imagery. To put the claim that 83.5 percent of Usenet images are pornographic into further context, Rimm derived those figures by examining the postings to seventeen out of the thirty-two Usenet groups that typically carried image files over a seven-day time period.

DEC research scientist Brian Reid noted in his trenchant criticism of the study, "I have been measuring USENET readership and analyzing USENET content, and publishing studies of what I find since April 1986. I have spent years refining the measurement techniques and the data processing algorithms. Despite those 9 years of working on the problem, I still do not believe that it is possible to get measurements whose accuracy is within a factor of 10 of the truth."[12]

A few weeks later, investigative journalist Brock Meeks, then Washington bureau chief of Inter@ctive Week [13], revealed in the award-winning electronic newsletter he publishes and writes, Cyberwire Dispatch, that Rimm had made a second contribution to the world's literature out of that data he'd collected from adult BBSs: The Pornographer's Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men and Make Lots of Money.

An excerpt from the book posted to several BBS-related newsgroups and later verified by Meeks read,

In this book, you will also discover the trade secrets of the most successful adult BBS in the business. You will learn the secrets not only of facial cumshots, but of 62 other types of images that you need to be aware of in marketing your adult BBS, from portraits to oral to anal to transsexual to fisting. You will learn about supply and demand curves, histograms, contingency table analysis, mean popularity indices, cluster analysis, and a host of other sophisticated marketing techniques never before applied by any adult BBS. And above all, never before published.

Other posted sections of the privately published book were far more offensive than this.

Ironically, as Meeks pointed out, Carnegie-Mellon University was simultaneously funding a different study called HomeNet, a field trial studying Internet use by a group of families in the Pittsburgh area who were supplied with the hardware, software, telephone, Internet connections, and training necessary to get them started online. HomeNet's September 1995 report found that "the sexually oriented newsgroups do not hold their readers."[14] Although thirteen of the top thirty newsgroups the 157 participants in forty-eight families accessed during the first five months of the trial were sexually oriented, the report notes that only four of the list of thirty newsgroups that were followed (that is, accessed three or more times) over the five months covered in the report were sexually oriented. In fact, it