This week, I just noticed three highly controversial new services on the Web. In "If the world was run like eBay," BBC News Magazine reports about an eBay-like lending and borrowing exchange in the U. K. And according to Wired News in "England's EBay for Sex," there is another British website where you can offer your sexual expertise, becoming in fact a part-time prostitute. Of course, you also can buy the services of such a part-time sex worker. But the most outrageous service of the week is described by the San Francisco Chronicle in "Point, click and shoot." From your computer, you can visualize animals living in a Texas ranch and kill them with a click of your mouse, using what the site calls "computer-assisted remote hunting." Are these services dangerous, illegal, and should they be shut down? Read more about them and send me your comments.
Let's start with the BBC News Magazine report about the eBay-style banking website.
This week saw the latest twist on what's come to be known as the "eBay model" with the launch of Zopa -- an online loans service that works in a similar way. Anyone with some spare cash can offer it up for a loan, through Zopa. Lenders set their own interest rates and can choose which borrowers to lend to, based on their credit rating.
Borrowers, meanwhile, can pick a rate that's right for them and because Zopa is simply assisting the transaction, not lending its own assets, it claims to take a smaller cut (1% of the amount borrowed) than a bank. Safeguards are built in to help prevent lenders being fleeced and the whole outfit is sanctioned by the FSA -- Britain's financial services watchdog.
I'm not sure that the safeguards set up by Zopa -- and well-detailed on their site -- will be enough to lure away fraud.
Meanwhile, Wired News tells us about how "a new British website is helping people to become part-time prostitutes."
Britain's AdultWork website is plugging into the growing niche industry of sex-work dilettantes, people who spend a few hours a week in front of a camera, or in bed with a client, to augment their income -- or maybe even just because they like it.
Of course, sex-related websites are not new, but this new one has a single activity: "AdultWork is an online clearinghouse for sex work."
At present it has almost 3,000 members offering services, and several times that number buying or browsing. In addition to sex, the services on offer include webcam peep shows, homemade movies, phone sex and sex by cell-phone SMS. The site launched in late 2003 but had little immediate impact. It's taken just under two years to rise to prominence.
Users must create a free account to browse the services offered. Users can rate the services they've tried, or even offer their own services. Like eBay, AdultWork takes a cut of all transactions, which are processed through the web bank Nochex.
And Wired News explains how "adultery has gone professional."
Katie's one of them. Katie describes herself as a BBW -- a "big, beautiful woman." A 45-year-old homemaker living in London, Katie has been working as a prostitute through AdultWork for three months.
...men’s double standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.
—Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)
Katie said her husband thinks she works a few hours a week for part-time employment agencies and spends the rest of the time looking after their 10-year-old daughter. Instead she makes daytime visits to clients' homes for sex.
"I have a husband, and sex outside of my marriage is fun," she said. "He doesn't know what I do, but I'm very careful STD-wise and really only do it once or twice a month. It's not much different from having an affair."
Depending on your point of view, this kind of service can be "immoral" or even illegal. Will it be shut down or be a big success? Time will tell.
Now, with the help of the San Francisco Chronicle, let's look at how computer users can shoot animals living in Texas from their homes. Here are the opening paragraphs.
On a Texas ranch, exotic sheep and antelope roam about, offering paying hunters an opportunity to bag some big game.
But when the prey wanders into view, the gun can be fired by someone half a world away with the simple click of a computer mouse.
A new Web phenomenon called computer-assisted remote hunting has so outraged one California lawmaker that she has introduced legislation to ban it.
Here is how the Live-Shot service works.
A Web camera is mounted in one area of the range, and both the camera and the gun can be manipulated remotely by computer. [John Lockwood, creator of the site,] said someone on the ground controls when the safety is off the gun to make sure there are no accidents and that the gun is not fired at an animal that is not eligible to be killed.
Luckily for the animals of the ranch, this new service has not been too successful -- yet.
[Lockwood] said only one animal has been killed through the Web site so far -- a wild boar during a hunt requested by a German television station. He has another hunt set up for early April, with a man who is a quadriplegic and can move only his face muscles.
"This guy was an avid hunter before his accident," Lockwood said. "He can't go out and hunt. People like him deserve as much right to hunt as anyone else."
... social roles vary in the extent to which it is culturally permissible to express ambivalence or negative feelings toward them. Ambivalence can be admitted most readily toward those roles that are optional, least where they are considered primary. Thus men repress negative feelings toward work and feel freer to express negative feelings toward leisure, sex and marriage, while women are free to express negative feelings toward work but tend to repress them toward family roles.
—Alice S. Rossi (b. 1922)
Right. But is this hunting or killing?
The San Francisco Chronicle also tells us about the costs.
Participants buy a monthly membership for $14. 95 and then sign up for 20-minute shoot sessions for $5.95 at the target range. Participating in a hunt to kill animals costs more and requires a Texas hunting license, which is also available on the Internet.
Lending or borrowing money on Internet, why not? Just measure your risks. Selling your body for sex has been done for ages, so again, why not over the Internet?
But killing animals using your computer should be stopped. If you live in the U. S., you should send a letter to your Congress (wo) man and ask her/him to introduce legislation to shut down this service.
Sources: Jonathan Duffy, BBC News Magazine, March 10, 2005; Jason Walsh, Wired News, March 7, 2005; Lynda Gledhill, San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2005; and various websites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Ecommerce
Internet
Miscellaneous
Web Sites.