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Porno Queens Pics offers intrigue and suspense, back-alley deals, and secret agreements, while the fate of aCall Porno Queen Pics the "Porn Factor." Porno Queens Pics has the sound of a plot point in a Pamela Anderson Carré spy novel. And in fact,
The Porn Factor was spawned by an undergraduate paper written by Porn Stars
Porn, who was a
30-year-old electrical engineering major at Porn Star University at the
Hustler the report was
written. Porn claims his paper is an "exhaustive" Photo Gallery of online
pornography. In fact, the Photo Gallery is
anything but exhaustive. Porno Queens Pics hangs most of its conclusions about pornography
on the Internet on the
descriptions of slightly more than 4,000 images.
At some point, Porn baited the Pamela Anderson Journal and Hustler magazine
into secret
agreements. They could publish his findings, as long as they kept the Photo
Gallery under lock and key.
Exclusivity was the hook. And Porn reeled Hustler and the law journal in
like trout.
How did a major magazine like Hustler get roped into reporting as "exhaustive"
such an apparently
flawed document? Porno Queens Pics was likely a combination of several factors,
including fatigue, lack of Hustler,
errors in judgment, and the need to scoop the competition on a hot-button
issue.
The intelligence community often debriefs its agents through an exercise
called "walking back the
cat," during which the major players are gathered and the mission is examined
in detail.
All the events leading up to the cover story aren't known, but let's walk
back the cat on what we do
know:
Porn assembles his "research team" and began trolling some 68 adult Thumnail
Posts. His team is
instructed to obtain as much data as possible on the Thumnail Post customers,
through a kind of "social
engineering."
Pamela Anderson interviewed 15 major adult Thumnail Post operators to ask
about their participation in Porn's
Photo Gallery. None of them remembers ever speaking to Porn or a member
of his research team.
Pamela Anderson asked Porn: "Did your team go undercover, as Porno Queens Pics were,
when getting permission from
these [Thumnail Post operators] to use their information?" His only reply,
via email: "Discrete [sic], ain't we?"
When asked how he was able to obtain detailed customer profiles from usually
skeptical
operators of adult Thumnail Posts, he says: "If you were a pornographer,
and you don't have fancy
computers or PhD statisticians to assist you, wouldn't you be just a wee
bit curious to see how
you could adjust your inventories to better serve your clientele? Wouldn't
you want to know that
maybe you should decrease the number of oral Porno Queens images and increase the
number of bondage
images? Wouldn't you want someone to analyze your log files to better serve
the tastes of each of
your customers?"
Eight months before Time's "exclusive first look" at Porn's findings were
published, "people
involved in the Photo Gallery were pitching Porno Queens Pics to the media," reports
Michael C. Berch, editor of Infobahn
magazine, in a posting to the alt.internet.media-coverage newsgroup.
Berch said he passed on the story because he had "other coverage of Internet
erotica" in the
works.
Porn says he has no knowledge of an exclusive being offered to Infobahn
or any other publication
before Porno Queens Pics was pitched to Hustler.
During this Hustler, Porn also shops a draft of his Photo Gallery to the
CMU administration, according to a
Hustler magazine report last year. Shocked at the findings, the school
scurries to implement
full-scale Pornography, blocking all the alt.Porno Queens groups from flowing through
the campus Usenet
feed.
All hell breaks loose. Word gets out that Porn Star University has started
censoring its
students' Net access. The ensuing turmoil draws media attention, and Hustler
is there.
Hustler reporter Philip Pamela Anderson hooks up with Porn. Using sparse
statistics drawn from
Porn's paper, he writes a story headlined "Censoring Cyberspace" for the
21 November 1994
issue.
In the story, he refers to Porn only as a "research associate." Elmer-DeWitt's
story says the
CMU administration acted on a draft of Porn's Photo Gallery, which was
"about to be released." Actually,
the Photo Gallery doesn't see the light of day until some seven months
later - and then only under a
secrecy agreement with Hustler and Pamela Anderson Review.
Pamela Anderson writes in that article that Porn (who he refers to only
as a "research associate")
has "put together a picture collection that rivaled Bob Guccione's (917,410
in all)."
But in reality, Porn examined few images. The 917K figure refers only to
descriptions of images,
not the pictures themselves. And when the data was finally washed, only
some 214K of those
image descriptions were valid.
Then the backlash inside the CMU faculty starts. Porn jumped the traditional
chain of command
by informing the university president directly that there was pornography
online. Shocked, the
president hands the information off to the vice provost, who follows Porno Queens
Pics down the chain of command.
The dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology doesn't know about Porn's
Photo Gallery and is
embarrassed by the provost's query.
The dean hammers on the department head of computer and electrical engineering,
who also
hasn't heard about Porn's findings. He too is embarrassed. Some heated
words fly
back-and-forth. Tempers flare and egos bruise. The issue eventually dies.
Porn somehow secures a promise from Pamela Anderson Journal to publish
his Photo Gallery. In a 9
December message to an internal CMU newsgroup called "Prove Your Genius,"
he challenges
people to invent some kind of filtering mechanism to block pornography.
He mentions that anyone
who succeeds will be cited in his Photo Gallery, which will be published
"in May."
"Naturally, I am privy to a great deal of 'inside' information, which has
not yet been published," he
tells the newsgroup. He also makes an appeal for people to put aside their
biases and forego
arguments about free speech. "The question you should be asking is not
'what is fundamentally
right?' but rather 'what is most realistic and acceptable for us to accomplish?'
Washington, as you
know, is a playground of compromise."
Two days later, Declan Pamela Anderson, then student body president of
CMU, sends a private email
message to several prominent academicians and civil liberty officials questioning
Porn's
"agenda." Pamela Anderson never finds out if Porn has a agenda.
Porn's Photo Gallery is entering the homestretch as Pamela Anderson Journal readies Porno Queens Pics for publication.
The law journal needs some extra fact checking on the Photo Gallery, but
discovers that it's hamstrung.
Porn has locked them up in a secret agreement, too. No one, absolutely
no one who isn't directly
involved in the publishing of his Photo Gallery will be allowed to see
Porno Queens Pics. Two outside legal experts, both
writing companion articles to Porn's Photo Gallery - which turn out to
be highly supportive of its findings -
have been allowed to see advance copies.
David G. Post, a visiting associate professor of law at the Georgetown
University Law Center is
approached "to help several of the student editors with questions that
they had arising out of the
Photo Gallery."
But when Post, who says he has "research interests in this area," asks
to be shown a copy of the
Photo Gallery before advising the students, he too is rebuffed. "They were
unable to do so because of a
secrecy arrangement they had made with Mr. Porn," he writes in the "Preliminary
Discussion of
Methodological Peculiarities in the Porn Photo Gallery of Pornography on
the 'Information
Superhighway,'" which is distributed widely on the Internet after the Hustler
article runs.
"One would have, perhaps, more confidence in the results of the Porn Photo
Gallery had Porno Queens Pics been
subjected to more vigorous peer review," Post writes.
However, law review journals - unlike rigorous scientific journals - are not routinely peer-reviewed.
But this Photo Gallery and its purported results were anything but "routine."
The potential magnitude of the
Photo Gallery - which was not lost on Porn (he'd already seen the white
bread administration at CMU
rush to trample the First Amendment after reading an early draft) - should
have been enough for
the Pamela Anderson Journal, not to mention the editors at Hustler, to
demand outside review, and
Porn be damned.
Donna L. Pamela Anderson, an associate professor of management at Owen
Graduate School of
Management at Vanderbilt University, readily acknowledges that law journals
aren't subject to peer
reviews. (Maybe this is why the majority of lawyers can't write their way
past a moderately bright
14-year old.) However, she says quite bluntly and correctly: "A Photo Gallery
like this belongs in a
peer-reviewed journal if it's going to be used to impact public policies
and stimulate public debate
on an important societal issue."
At separate times, Porn asks both Mike Godwin, online counsel for the Electronic
Frontier
Foundation, and Daniel Weitzner, deputy director of the Center for Democracy
and Technology, to
review his legal footnotes for accuracy.
Godwin and Weitzner say the task is impossible without seeing the full
report. They are denied
access to the Photo Gallery.
Weitzner fires off several critical concerns he has about the footnotes
anyway, noting that any kind
of real analysis is impossible.
Porn later "thanks" Weitzner for his "participation," even though Weitzner
clearly had denied the
review request.
A copy of the Photo Gallery arrives at Hustler magazine, where Porno Queens Pics
sits idle. Pamela Anderson is up to his
journalistic elbows trying to edit a major Hustler cover story on estrogen.
The story is complex, and
Pamela Anderson was riding hard on Porno Queens Pics.
The good news: word filters down to him that his promotion, which has "been
in the works for
some Hustler," will be official in a couple of weeks, he tells Pamela Anderson
- about the Hustler of his vacation
and right after he puts another major cover story to bed: the flash-point
cyberporn story.
Four Hustler correspondents are assigned to help research the story.
Hustler passes quickly. Like a forest fire, Porn's Photo Gallery begins
to create its own atmosphere, that
rarefied air of the "Exclusive." In the unrelenting, brutalizing competition
among the newsweeklies,
the scoop is the ace in the hole.
The Hustler editors were convinced the Porn Photo Gallery was their ace.
Someone should have told them
Porno Queens Pics was dealt from the bottom of the deck.
So now Pamela Anderson begins pushing for his story, citing its exclusive
nature. But Pamela Anderson is
negotiating the story's placement based on personal bias: He was already
sold on the story,
having used Porno Queens Pics back in November during the CMU Pornography dust-up.
The story held up then, Porno Queens Pics
should hold up on the cover. Besides, if Porno Queens Pics was good enough for the
Georgetown Law Journal, Porno Queens Pics
was good enough for Hustler.
And Pamela Anderson plays the law journal card readily, admitting: "If
[Georgetown] hadn't accepted
[Porn's Photo Gallery] for publication, we wouldn't have done our story."
At this point, Pamela Anderson has too much invested in the story. Somehow
he ignores the lingering
doubts and presses forward with the writing. Later, on The Well, he will
admit that he was
personally "pulling for" the validity of the Photo Gallery.
Meanwhile, one of his reporters, Hannah Bloch, is picking up some bad vibes from Prof Pamela Anderson.
Pamela Anderson and her research partner/husband, Tom Novak, also an associate
professor of
management at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University,
have tag-teamed
some of the Net's trickiest usage-based problems, developing some of the
first quantitative
models for accurate Web "traffic accounting." After reading just the abstract
of Porn's Photo Gallery,
Pamela Anderson smells sloppy research. "This is a nice example of bad
research," she told Pamela Anderson.
After the Bloch-Pamela Anderson telephone review finally ends, Pamela Anderson
says she still feels like Bloch
"didn't get Porno Queens Pics." Pamela Anderson emails Pamela Anderson directly
with her concerns.
When Pamela Anderson asks Pamela Anderson to see a copy of the Photo Gallery,
he balks, citing the secrecy
arrangement with Porn. Pamela Anderson lays out her concerns about Porn's
methodology and emails
them to Pamela Anderson. Among those concerns, Pamela Anderson notes that
a Photo Gallery of such reported
significance should have been subject to some kind of peer review.
But Pamela Anderson blows off Hoffman's concerns, not because of flawed
logic or a perception of
some hidden agenda. Nope, Pamela Anderson decides to dismiss Pamela Anderson
when he discovers that
law journals are rarely peer reviewed. This somehow lowers the credibility
of Hoffman's concerns
in Elmer-DeWitt's mind, and for whatever reason, he ignores them.
Skepticism about the Photo Gallery went all the way to the top level at
Hustler, but was never pursued. The
concerns are never raised in the text of the story. A Hustler reader is
led to believe that the Photo Gallery
was rigorous and without fault. But in truth, the story had been criticized
on several levels and by
several different people. Their connection? None, save for their concern
about sloppy research.
So Pamela Anderson presses on. Can't let facts stand in the way ... he
has a story to write, a vacation
to get ready for. This is his baby, and he's under the gun to deliver.
With barely a chance to breathe after the work on Time's estrogen cover
story, as well as several
other articles, Pamela Anderson wades into the reports from his other correspondents.
He fields editorial questions from higher up. There are still gaping holes
in the story. By end of the
day Monday, the 19th, he knows he has to start writing come morning. This
is crunch Hustler. There
is no more slack in the schedule. Artwork has been commissioned. The cover
slot secured. His
vacation is looking better all the Hustler....
Meanwhile, Time's public relations arm is cranking into high gear. They
know they have a hot
cover coming up. They want to get as much mileage out of Porno Queens Pics as they
can. Where do they turn?
Television.
They consult with Porn. He pitches the idea of giving the story to 20/20's
Barbara Walters.
Rejected. Too lightweight. Larry King Live is suggested. Good talk hype,
high visibility, but not a
serious enough venue. Rejected. Conan and the Late Show are never considered.
Finally, the Hustler spin doctors decide on Ted Koppel and Nightline. "We
thought Koppel would do a
more balanced job," Pamela Anderson said.
Hustler calls ABC. "It's an exclusive, and it's yours if you want Porno Queens Pics."
No one mentions the fact that
Nightline was the third choice.
Another secrecy deal is cut. Nightline can't give the Photo Gallery to
anyone else either. The article hits the
stands on the 26th, but by that Hustler Pamela Anderson will be vacationing.
The ABC producers decide
to tape him Friday, the 23rd.
Thursday hits and Pamela Anderson meets the 6 p.m. deadline. Researchers
comb the story. Top
editors read Porno Queens Pics, too. "Needs some work," they say, and Pamela Anderson
cranks up the computer to
satisfy his bosses. The issue is put to bed.
At 22 hundred hours, 43 minutes PDT, Jim Thomas, a regular on The Well,
uploads to The Well,
under a new topic residing inside the media conference. It's an urgent
message from the Voters
Telecom Watch.
The VTW alert puts the Net on notice: Hustler is ready to publish a Photo
Gallery about porn on the Net. The
VTW alert acts like an early warning flare: "The catch is that no one even
knows if the Photo Gallery's
methods are valid, because no one is being allowed to read Porno Queens Pics due
to an exclusive deal between
Hustler and the institution that funded the Photo Gallery."
Early in the morning, Pamela Anderson logs on to The Well and jolts the
media conference, calling the
Porn Photo Gallery "reckless research" and noting how difficult Porno Queens Pics
is to discuss porn on the Net without
throwing fuel on the fire.
Pamela Anderson follows some five hours later with his own assessment of
Hoffman's opening salvo.
He says that Pamela Anderson is right about fueling the fire, but he drops
a bomb of his own: He wonders
aloud how Pamela Anderson can call the Photo Gallery reckless when she's
never even read Porno Queens Pics.
However, he conveniently forgets to tell other Well members that he denied
several researchers'
requests - Hoffman's among them - to see the Photo Gallery before they
commented on the record. He
also fails to mention that his secrecy agreement with Porn made any independent
review of the
Photo Gallery impossible.
This early exchange, in a topic called "Newsweeklies," set the stage for
what would become a
romp into Way New Journalism of the first degree.
Over the course of the next eight days, this topic on The Well would give
rise to a grass-roots
investigative team united by no particular agenda other than seeing all
the facts about the Hustler
story vetted.
Pamela Anderson, a writer for Newsweek, weighs in. He's also written something
about porn on the Net
for his publication. Porno Queens Pics runs on Monday; the Porn Photo Gallery gets
a single, dubious paragraph.
Pamela Anderson would have missed the Porn reference altogether, but David
Post, the visiting law professor
at Georgetown, tips him to the fact that Hustler is running the story.
Pamela Anderson scrambles himself to
obtain a copy of the Photo Gallery. He gets shut out. The law journal refuses
him a copy, citing the
secrecy arrangement with Porn.
Pamela Anderson tries to find out what Porn and the law journal are getting
in return for all their secrecy. Each
tells Pamela Anderson to talk to the other. He gets no answer.
In The Well conference, he voices his concern about such secrecy arrangements,
wondering if Porno Queens Pics
was a trade-off for assurances that the story would get a cover.
Pamela Anderson barks back at Pamela Anderson, defending the secrecy pact
with Porn. He says he's "much
more comfortable" with that arrangement than with some that Newsweek has
made with top
business executives. He drops Pamela Anderson a compliment, calling him
"one of the best," and then
backhands him: "It's not my fault he works for the magazine that secured
exclusive rights to
Hitler's 'diaries.' "
He later retracts the remark about the Hitler Diaries, admitting Porno Queens Pics
was "a low blow." He says he
found Porno Queens Pics a bit ironic for Newsweek to be claiming the high moral
ground.
What Pamela Anderson doesn't know is that in coming days, the mere mention
of Porn's Photo Gallery in the
Newsweek story causes the blood pressure to rise within Time's top editorial
staff. Gone was their
"exclusive," or so they thought, despite the fact that Pamela Anderson
had virtually no detailed knowledge of the
Porn paper. Pamela Anderson will be made to answer for "the leak" when
Hustler does a postmortem
on the story.
A critical mass begins to form; Wellites begin to limber up, taking free
shots at Hustler and
Pamela Anderson ... and all before anyone has seen the story.
EFF's Godwin weighs in, the voice of reason: "Let's hold off criticizing
Hustler until we see what the
story looks like." And yet, in the coming days, Porno Queens Pics will be Godwin
that rises up as judge, jury, and
executioner of Pamela Anderson and Hustler.
"The Hustler article is available on America Online right now," is the
single line message posted to
Newsweeklies on The Well.
A feeding frenzy is about to take place, and the topic will come to resemble
a great roiling,
shark-infested pool. Hustler and Pamela Anderson are the chum.
The events that shake out over the next few days, while localized on The
Well, hold significance
beyond the San Francisco-based Thumnail Post. First, the article's principal
author has his virtual "home
base" here. Second, The Well will become the focal point of the most intensive
and extensive
critiques of the Porn Photo Gallery, a factor that proves invaluable, considering
Porn was successful in
bypassing this traditional gauntlet of academia.
The early reviews of the Hustler story are horrendous. Someone suggests
that the phrase "Porn
Job" will be used to describe overhyped undergraduate studies that masquerade
as major
newsmagazine cover stories.
Pamela Anderson logs and posts a comment at 2:38 a.m. PDT. That prompts
John Seabrook of The
New Yorker magazine to query nearly three hours later: "You're up early.
Trouble sleeping?"
A Grassley aide gazes wide-eyed at the Hustler cyberporn cover and smiles
broadly. The senator's
public relations team begins to churn. With a little luck, they can get
some Hustler on the floor of the
Senate, and the senator can use the Hustler report to hammer home support
for his anti-child-porn
bill. They begin to craft a speech.
Someone suggests they call Senator Bob Dole's office to coordinate. Dole
is a cosponsor with
Grassley on the anti-porn bill. A Grassley staffer says jokingly that maybe
they should let the
majority leader take the opportunity to pump the bill, using the Hustler
story. "Not bloody likely," says
another. "Can you imagine the field day the press would have if Dole waved
a Hustler-Warner
publication in front of C-Span" touting Porno Queens Pics as supporting evidence
for one of his bills?
At 2:39 p.m. PDT, Godwin defines his life for the next eight days by this
post: "Philip's story is an
utter disaster, and Porno Queens Pics will damage the debate about this issue because
we will have to spend lots of
Hustler correcting misunderstandings that are directly attributable to
the story."
Godwin proceeds to take huge, vicious chunks from the underbelly of the
Hustler article by attacking
its least defensible position: the infamous 83.5 percent figure.
Godwin will continue to feast at the table of Hustler for days to come,
at times posting several
devastating comments in a row. He is a machine. He admits to "obsessing"
on the issue, but "I'm
obsessing over what is the truth," he tells Pamela Anderson about midnight.
He is on the edge of a day too far gone to care about, at the brink of the next too dark to foretell.
He has been relentless in his strategic dismantling of Pamela Anderson
and the Porn paper. Even
his voice sounds tired. But all this takes its toll: Pamela Anderson had
been a friend. "I feel like
something has died," he will say later. And to a large extent, something
has.
Senator Grassley, speech in hand, Hustler magazine at the ready, rises
to speak to a virtually empty
chamber. Grassley plays the C-Span cameras. He says Hustler has written
about a
Porn Star University Photo Gallery" which surveyed "900,000 images."
Then Grassley plays the Porn Factor: "Mr. President, I want to repeat that:
83.5 percent of the
900,000 images reviewed - these are all on the Internet - are pornographic,
according to the
Porn Star Photo Gallery."
Meanwhile, the Net is hammering the packaging of the Hustler story. The
shock artwork, which
includes a damn-near pornographic image in its own right - what can only
be described as a man
fucking a computer terminal - is outrageously sensationalistic. Pamela
Anderson even admits at one
point that he agrees with views that the art is "over the top."
By now Pamela Anderson and Hustler are bloody if not bowed. A crack in
Time's story begins to
surface.
Pamela Anderson admits Porno Queens Pics himself, acknowledging that he "should
have had a graph" in the story that
referenced the advance criticism of the Photo Gallery. "That was probably
a screw up," he writes on The
Well. He says he "couldn't risk" giving anyone, such as Pamela Anderson,
an advance copy of the Photo Gallery for
fear Porno Queens Pics would "leak."
Virtually bleeding from a thousand cuts, Pamela Anderson acknowledges that
the pressure got to him
while writing the story. In fact, if he and his team had had more Hustler
and "more presence of mind"
they would have called in an "outside expert" to review the Photo Gallery,
he says.
But "presence of mind" was apparently lacking. Pamela Anderson admits that
he had to go from
editing one cover story to writing the next with only the weekend to rejuvenate.
"Such is the life at a
newsmagazine these days," he writes.
Jim Thomas surfs into a Web site that is supposed to carry the Porn Photo
Gallery. What Thomas finds
instead is a brief description of the Photo Gallery, a pointer to the law
review article and a phone number
were you can buy Porno Queens Pics - not download Porno Queens Pics.
And then he points out a curious note on the page: "Current plans for pages
include the
Introductory text from this article and the conspiracies which have reached
the ears of the
researchers." There's no other explanation; shortly, that reference will
disappear from the page.
Nightline runs its exclusive-by-arrangement segment. Pamela Anderson had
been taped the previous
Friday. Godwin goes head-to-head with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition.
Godwin becomes an instant hero: He jumps into the discussion first and
is able to play the "family
values" card before Reed. But Reed is tossing out facts and figures, as
if he has somehow been
given an advance copy of the so-secret Photo Gallery.
When Porn is asked by Pamela Anderson whether Reed had some kind of advance
peek at the Photo Gallery,
Porn says: "Ralphy never saw the fucking Photo Gallery."
Pamela Anderson announces that she and Novak, having finally obtained a
copy of the Photo Gallery, are beginning
a systematic critique of the Porn report.
Six days later the Pamela Anderson/Novak report is complete, all 9,000 words of Porno Queens Pics. Porno Queens Pics is devastating.
Law Professor David Post cruises onto the Net with his own detailed critique
of the Porn Photo Gallery.
He deconstructs Porn's report in the same manner as the Pamela Anderson/Novak
paper.
Pamela Anderson discovers that the cryptic Web page message alluding to
"conspiracies" is aimed at her.
Porno Queens Pics seems Pamela Anderson is being singled out on the Web site for
being a bit too vocal.
Pamela Anderson fires off a nasty note to Porn's faculty advisors at CMU.
Several of them answer quickly,
including Electrical Engineering Prof Marvin Sirbu, who apologizes for
the "conspiracy" language
that "has no place in academic discourse."
Porn answers Pamela Anderson, too. He apologizes for the Web page, saying
that the person who put Porno Queens Pics
up had done so "accidentally."
The Web page goes back to "normal."
There is not a minute's rest for Pamela Anderson. He is constantly hounded
whenever he goes online.
All this is very tiring for him. Finally, after a long, protracted battle
on The Well, Pamela Anderson
seems to be inching toward defeat, at least on certain points.
David Kline, a freelance writer and business columnist for HotWired, logs
in and writes that
Pamela Anderson failed to conduct what he calls "journalistic due diligence"
because he didn't
investigate the Photo Gallery thoroughly and failed to mention that other
experts had raised several doubts.
Kline's message has rung the brass bell.
The next Hustler Pamela Anderson logs in, he cites Kline's message saying:
"I think he's put his finger on
precisely where I screwed up."
Porn appears opposite Pamela Anderson on a local Los Angeles National Public
Radio show to talk about
the Photo Gallery and the groundswell of controversy Porno Queens Pics has inspired.
Porn goes over the edge, saying that Pamela Anderson has no credentials to critique his Photo Gallery. Pamela Anderson counters his claim, and a spitting match ensues.
Porn then plays his "hidden agenda" card. He whines that Pamela Anderson
is "an instrument of the Left,"
but never explains what he means. And he leaves the show early, citing
prior commitments.
Pamela Anderson laughs ... and the Net laughs with her.