SexyTech

Use for sexuality topics intersecting with technology

Tinder Usage Up 129% Among Athletes at the Rio Summer Olympics

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

By now, it’s common knowledge that Olympic athletes hook up during their time in the Olympic Village. And naturally, one way to facilitate this is via dating apps. Specifically, Tinder has proved to be the number one choice for Olympic athletes looking to get laid.

Over the first weekend of this year’s Olympics, Tinder usage spiked a whopping 129% amongst the athletes. Impressive, right? But the data is incomplete.

This is the second Olympics where Tinder has made a splash. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, it was reported that mobile dating usage surged, and that Tinder was the app of choice. However, since this is solely anecdotal evidence, no numbers have been reported so that we can’t gauge the size of said surge. And we cannot make any year-over-year comparisons of the growth.

Another issue is that, yes, Tinder usage is up 129% among athletes, but to what are we comparing the activity? Are we comparing to the usage data to the previous Summer Olympics (which would be London in 2012) or the most recent Olympics (the aforementioned Sochi)?

Though the number raises a few questions, it’s pretty entertaining to realize that elite athletes are just like the rest of us.

Porn Site Blocks North Carolina IP Addresses

Typing on a laptop keyboard (Free Stock Photos)

By now, we’ve all heard about what’s going on in North Carolina with the House Bill 2 (HB2), which has abolished statewide anti-discrimination legislation against the LGBT community. Many companies are unhappy about it, and have either threatened to, or already have, pulled their business from the state.

One company is doing something a little different. Porn site xHamster has begun blocking any inbound users from any North Carolina (NC) IP addresses. At first, users with these addresses saw only a black screen. Later, NC users were asked if they supported HB2. If they answered affirmatively, they see numbers relating to NC users who search for “gay” and “she male” as keywords for their porn consumption. (Spoiler alert: the numbers for those are not insignificant.)

xHamster.com homepage for NC IP addresses (@xhamstercom)

It is unclear how many IP addresses are registered in NC, and how many visitors xHamster.com receives in a given month.

Pornhub Data of 2015: By The Numbers

Pornhub Insights 2015 Year in Review (Pornhub Insights)

I always love it when certain tech companies release their user data for the general public’s education/amusement. Last week, we learned about OkCupid stats. This week, it’s Pornhub.

Pornhub is pretty good about releasing user insights (see their recent post on activity during winter storm Jonas), and their year-end data, released last month, is no exception. The following numbers are just what I found most interesting, and you can read the full report on Pornhub’s Insights blog (NSFW, BTW).

Amount of bandwidth used: 1,892 petabytes (PBs)

Context: 1 PB = 1,000 terabytes (TB) = 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB), i.e. that’s a hell of a lot of data

Average visit duration (U.S. only): 9 minutes, 51 seconds

Pornhub 2015 Year in Review: Hourly Traffic Worldwide (Pornhub Insights)

Most popular search term worldwide: lesbian

Top pornstar: Kim Kardashian

Top term searched more in 2015 than in 2014: giantess (+1,091%)

Pornhub 2015 Year in Review: Women – Worldwide Traffic (Pornhub Insights)

Country with highest proportion of female users: Jamaica (44%)

Country with highest proportion of female users: Japan (17%)

Average age of Pornhub users: 35.3 years

Pornhub 2015 Year in Review: Traffic by Device Worldwide (Pornhub Insights)

Most popular mobile operating system (OS): Android (49.7%)

Most popular desktop browser: Chrome (48.9%)

This is all so fascinating to me, and I hope you feel the same!

#ThrowbackThursday: Pornhub Data during Winter Storm Jonas, 2015

Pornhub Stats: Traffic during Winter Storm Jonas (Pornhub Insights)

A few weeks ago, winter storm Jonas shut down a few cities on the East Coast. Naturally, people were going a little stir-crazy. The good people at Pornhub delved into the data, examining how the traffic was affected as opposed to a regular weekend. For the full report, hit Pornhub’s post on the site’s Insights blog (NSFW, as you probably guessed).

#ThrowbackThursday: Mark Zuckerberg and Pregnant Priscilla Chan, 2015

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, 2015 (Business Insider)

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg (Business Insider)

On July 31, 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on (where else?) Facebook that he and his wife Priscilla were expecting a baby girl. He also revealed that the couple had weathered three miscarriages in the span of two years.

Zuckerberg rarely posts personal things on his own site, so this was a break from routine for him. The confession earned him praise.

The Zuckerbergs’ daughter Max was born on Dec. 1, 2015.

Beth Comstock is GE’s First Female Vice Chair

GE Vice Chair Beth Comstock (Fast Company)

Big news from a major corporation: Conglomerate General Electric named Beth Comstock a new Vice Chair. She oversees marketing for the company, becoming chief marketing officer in 2003. Oh yeah, she’s the first woman to hold the executive position (no big!). She joins three other men as her fellow vice chairs.

Comstock’s official title is Vice Chair of Business Innovations (pretty cool, huh?). Per “Fast Company,” here’s what the Business Innovations unit actually is and does:

[It] accelerates new business and helps established commercial ventures transition into GE’s technology universe. The Business Innovations arm houses GE Lighting, GE Ventures & Licensing, software commercialization and corporate marketing, sales, and communications.

Comstock is credited with helping GE focus on the future, in terms of the “industrial internet.” The concept marries data analysis with GE’s traditional, industrial products. CEO Jeff Immelt has called her “a catalyst for digital innovation and growth.”

I can’t wait to see how she’ll evolve GE into the future.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is Pregnant with Twin Girls

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (The New Yorker)

Last week, Marissa Mayer, best-known as Yahoo’s CEO (one of the most-well known female CEOs in tech, if not the world), announced that she’s pregnant with twin girls. She made the announcement in a way befitting her industry: on Yahoo’s Tumblr.

The twins will be the second and third children for Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue. Mayer gave birth to her first child, her son Macallister, in September 2012. (That year was a momentous one for her: She became CEO of Yahoo earlier in July.) Mayer announced her pregnancy the same day that Yahoo announced her as their new CEO.

Mayer has said she’ll work through her pregnancy before her due date in December. She also worked through most of her first pregnancy.

After her son’s birth, Mayer famously didn’t take a break for maternity leave, returning to work only two week after giving birth. She also installed a nursery right next door to her office.

It’ll be interesting to see if having to care for two babies at once slows her down at all, and if she changes her views on feminism and working from home.

How Many Media Company Employees Had Ashley Madison Accounts?

Ashley Madison homepage (Ashley Madison)

Happy Friday! Ashley Madison: It’s the hack that keeps on giving. Every day brings a new joy. And here’s this one: The good people at “Gawker” (who’ve been doing a great job covering this whole thing) took a deep-dive into the data, all 9.7 GBs of it. Why? Well, to see how was dumb enough to use a work email as their AM registration email. (Personally, I’m surprised that nobody got called on the carpet after their network got wind of that verification email in their inbox.)

Now, you’d think that most people would know to use a throwaway email for this kind of thing, right? You’d think that, and you’d be wrong. At the time of the data dump, “Wired” reported that 15K+ domains belonging to the government and military were found, comprising .04% of the total emails found.

Here’s what Sam Biddle at “Gawker” found. (Incidentally, no emails registered to the Gawker domain were found).

‘Gawker’ Ashley Madison Email Data Analysis (Gawker)

So yeah, have some common sense as to when to use your work email. Have a great holiday weekend!

Twitter Announces Diversity Goals for 2016

Twitter logo (Design Trend)

Last week, Twitter announced its goals to diversify the company’s employees in 2016. The goals focused on increasing the presence of female and non-white employees. For the women, this includes reaching 35% women overall in the company, with 16% of tech roles going to women and 25% of leadership roles getting filled by women. For minorities, the goals are bringing the number to 11% in the overall company, with 9% of tech roles and 6% of leadership roles. Interestingly, the goals for minorities are marked with a literal asterisk, and apply to within the US only. (I’d like to know the reasoning behind that, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.)

This follows Twitter’s identifying and committing to diversity as a workplace issue. Last year, the company shared its diversity numbers. Spoiler alert (or not): it’s a whole lotta white dudes. While the company overall is about 70% male/30% female, it skews more guy-heavy in the tech section. Ethnically speaking, white and Asian employees comprise the largest portions, at nearly 60% and 30% respectively. Employees who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino or as Black or African-American make up only about 5% of the Twitter workforce.

Even though it looks like Twitter’s taking some big steps forward, Julia Greenberg at “Wired” points out that these steps are actually pretty small:

As it stands now, the company already has 34 percent women on its staff, with 13 percent in tech roles and 22 percent in leadership roles—not too far off from its goals. With 4,100 employees worldwide currently, the difference would be adding at least 41 women to reach its overall gender goal (though it would depend on the company’s growth).

Twitter is just the latest in a line of tech companies who’ve released their not-so-diverse data (following Facebook and Google, among others). It’ll be interesting to see how these goals will change due to supply and demand over time.

Ashley Madison Hackers Post the Site’s User Data

Ashley Madison homepage (Ashley Madison)

Happy Friday! Remember when cheating site Ashley Madison was hacked last month? And how the hackers threatened to release user data to the whole Internet?

Well, they’ve finally done it. The Impact Team, as the group of hackers is known, put the data online on the Dark Web, which can only be reached using specialized equipment. They dumped a jaw-dropping 9.7 GigaBytes (GBs) of data that went back to 2008.

(For context/scale, I have a 4 TeraByte (TB) external hard drive that I keep old school projects and work on. I’ve had that thing for over 6 years, and still haven’t filled it up. One TB is equal to .001 GBs. So you can imagine how voluminous this data breach truly is.)

There seems to be some disagreement over exactly how many users had data leaked. “CNN Money” claims 32M, while “Wired” and “Engadget” put the number closer to 37M.

As of July, Ashley Madison claimed to have 40M+ users.

Ashley Madison data dump (Gizmodo)

Among the metrics leaked were users’ names, addresses and phone numbers. “Wired” looked into some initial data analysis:

A sampling of the data indicates that users likely provided random numbers and addresses, but files containing credit card transactions will yield real names and addresses, unless members of the site used anonymous pre-paid cards. One analysis of email addresses found in the data dump also shows that some 15,000 are .mil. or .gov addresses.

Passwords were broken by “hashing,” or breaking into the algorithm a site would use to protect passwords. The hackers used the “bcrypt” algorithm used in web development language PHP. This is usually a secure measure to protect passwords. But hey, at least Ashley Madison tried:

It’s notable, however, that the cheating site, in using the secure hashing algorithm, surpassed many other victims of breaches we’ve seen over the years who never bothered to encrypt customer passwords.

Have a great weekend, and go change your passwords!

Sex & Stats: Where Numbers Come to Bang

Statistics. Economics. Sex.