A Mobile man is being charged under Alabama’s new revenge porn law after he allegedly posted naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend on social media.
Bryndon Bess, 21, is accused of posting the pictures on social media app Snapchat and refused to stop until the victim spoke to him, according to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department.
The new law, formally known as Distributing Private Images, went into effect one year ago and carries up to a year in jail.
A Colorado law designed to punish people for revenge porn — posting intimate photos of former lovers or spouses on the internet typically following a break-up — has resulted in nearly 200 charges since it was passed three years ago, but securing convictions and guilty pleas has been a challenge. There have been 192 misdemeanor cases for non-consensual pornography filed since House Bill 14-1378 became law in July 2014. Just over a third of those have resulted in guilty pleas or verdicts, reflecting the difficulty of proving the cases but also, possibly, weaknesses in the law. While law enforcement officials and victims advocates praised the law’s success, they remained measured because, The Denver Post found, many cases have been either dismissed or set aside in plea-bargain deals. Also, it doesn’t appear anyone has yet used the law’s strongest tool at punishing someone for allegedly posting nude photos of ex-girlfriends or…
LONDON: An Italian former financial analyst who posted pictures of a female intern colleague on pornographic websites was on Tuesday jailed by a London court for 16 weeks. Davide Buccheri, 25, of Bologna, Italy, was also ordered to pay 5,000 Pounds (5,670 euros, $6,810) in compensation to her. He was sentenced following a conviction for harassment at Westminster Magistrates’ Court last Friday. The London School of Economics graduate carried out a seven-month campaign against his victim after she rejected his romantic advances while they both worked at M&G Investments. He took photos from her social media and uploaded them alongside pornographic pictures of other women, before trying to discredit her by telling their bosses at the asset management firm. “You, having been spurned by her in a very professional and gentle and understanding way, set about on a course of revenge,” said Judge Richard Blake in passing sentence. “This is a…
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the number of offences increased to 105 last year, up from 55 in 2015. So far this year 73 offences have been reported. Wolverhampton Liberal Democrat campaigner Rob Quarmby said: “I don’t want to see, as I do sometimes, a child’s first conversation about the meaning of consent being in a police interview room. “I have a daughter and the thought that something like this can happen to her horrifies me?” Revenge porn is the distribution of a private sexual image of someone without their consent, with the aim of causing distress. It is a phenomenon that has swept the country, with teenagers and young adults taking and sharing naked photographs on smartphones.
A realistic-looking video that seemed to show former President Barack Obama cussing and calling President Donald Trump a “total and complete dips—,” went viral on Tuesday, bringing attention to the dangers of a controversial video-editing technology that many have called “the future of fake news.” About halfway through the video, originally published by BuzzFeed, it is revealed that Obama had actually not uttered those words and that they were actually said by “Get Out” director and writer Jordan Peele, whose voice and mouth had been digitally inserted into an original — much less scandalous — video of the former president. Here’s the full video: Peele, BuzzFeed, and Monkeypaw Productions used a controversial but widely available software to make the video, in an effort to demonstrate the dangers of “deepfakes,” aka digitally manipulated videos that have the power to “make it look like anyone is saying [or doing] anything at…
SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Mean, hurtful comments online, spreading rumors, even threats. Cyber bullying is sadly, incredibly common and something local school officials are racing to keep up with. Dr. Gausman says, “We’re not able to use solutions that might have worked 10 years ago to address the challenges of cyber bullying and social media. We’re we’re working with challenges that have come to the fore in last last five years. And so, just as soon as adults seem to acquire working knowledge of social media software, the students have already moved onto something new, so it’s important for us to consider new ways to deal with this. ” Sioux City Superintendent of Schools Paul Gausman is preparing to go to Washington D.C. to address the President’s Commission on School Safety. He says, along with changing technology, there’s perhaps an even bigger challenge for schools dealing with cyber bullying. Gausman says, “The challenge…
Published July 28, 2018, 3:21 PM By Ellalyn De Vera-Ruiz The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has warned the public against the proliferation of fake social media accounts using the agency’s name that may be used to extort money in exchange of the availment of government services. (MANILA BULLETIN) “We would like to warn the public on the proliferation of fake Facebook accounts bearing the name of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). The circulation of these accounts is alarming since they can be used to deceive the public to support or donate money for fake initiatives of the government that will help poor Filipinos,” DSWD Acting Secretary Virginia Orogo said. One of the said fake accounts was discovered under the profile name, “DSWD PH” which uses the official social media logo of the DSWD field office in Central Luzon. At present, the Department only…
A University of Utah student was being extorted by her ex-boyfriend before he killed her, police say. Lauren McCluskey, 21, had reported an extortion attempt to university police on Oct. 13, nine days before she was killed. McCluskey told the officers that she had wired $1,000 to an account earlier in the month to prevent “compromising pictures” of her and her ex-boyfriend Melvin Rowland from being released to the public, according to Fox News. But it took six days for university police to begin investigating the extortion attempt - a fact officials blamed on workload issues, according to CBS News. Also, while they were aware of the 37-year-old Rowland’s status as a sex offender, they didn’t know he was on parole at the time. “It was assigned out to a detective. The detective had been in contact with Ms. McCluskey, and they were working to build a case against our…
FACEBOOK wants to stop revenge porn BEFORE it happens - by getting people to send in their own naughty sex pictures. The social network is testing a system which uses image recognition to identify revenge porn and automatically delete it. Getty Images Social media makes it terrifyingly easy to spread revenge porn But this can only work if Facebook has copies of the dirty pictures in the first place. Zuckerberg’s firm is running a pilot scheme in Australia and has teamed up with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner to trial its new idea. Julie Inman Grant, e-Safety Commissioner, said people who were worried about “image-based abuse” should give Facebook their sexy pics. “It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether,” she told ABC. Getty Images Would you be…
For years, Anon-IB, the internet’s most notorious epicenter of revenge porn, thrived as users posted nude photos and videos of women without their consent. They published these images under the assumption that they were anonymous—their usernames were “Anonymous” followed by a string of letters. A new heatmap visualization using IP adresses of Anon-IB users highlights that people who share revenge porn on the forum weren’t as anonymous as they may have thought. In March, cybercrime teams from the Dutch police seized the Anon-IB forum as part of an investigation. Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security analyst, turned the IP address data—strings of numbers that reveal the location of a computer connected to the internet—that he collected before the seizure, into a heat map of where people were posting from. Stangvik shared much of the data, which spans from February 2015 to January 2018, with The Daily Beast in January. Across…
The Dutch police recently located and shut down the servers of Anon-IB, a message board notorious for revenge porn, i.e. nude photos that have been obtained and reshared without the owner’s consent. In 2011 nude photos of Emma Holten, a Danish feminist activist, were hacked from her email account and posted online, including on Anon-IB. She later received international attention for how she chose to handle the situation, by publishing a nude photoshoot of herself, in an effort to emphasize the difference between consensual and non-consensual sharing of personal data. “It’s both terrifyingly interesting and interestingly terrifying” According to VICE, TNW Conference is quite the event In wake of Anon-IB’s closure, TNW talked to Holten about what this means for victims of revenge porn and how shutting down Anon-IB was a milestone for fighting it. What Anon-IB represented Before it was shut down, Anon-IB was a…
Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian are slated to face off next week in their bitter revenge porn drama, RadarOnline.com exclusively learned. Kardashian, 30, posted a series of naked photos and videos of his baby mama to social media on July 5, and after obtaining a temporary restraining order against him, Chyna, 29, hired legal ace Lisa Bloom to fight for her rights and make her baby daddy pay for his crude posts. “Chyna and Rob have a mediation date set for next Tuesday,” an insider spilled to Radar. “She is trying to make him pay for posting those naked pictures and videos of her. She is not going to settle for a couple of thousand dollars either. She wants millions.” PHOTOS: Blac Chyna Claims Ex Rob Kardashian ‘Is Mentally Ill’ Following Shocking Split “Chyna lost serious money after Rob posted those things. And she wants Rob to make sure that…
Back in 2010, most people weren’t familiar with the term ‘revenge porn’. It hadn’t yet entered the pop culture lexicon, but over the next eight years it certainly would as everyone from high school students to A-List celebrities fell victim to one of the digital age’s biggest downsides. Arguably the first place the phenomenon was birthed was the website Is Anyone Up?, founded by Hunter Moore. The high school dropout, former band manager and sometimes DJ originally started the site as a type of chat forum, however, its specialty quickly shifted to revenge porn. As shown in the documentary Hunter Moore: The Revenge Pornographer the site soon exploded from a niche portal shared among scorned lovers, to something Moore claimed grew from 50 hits a day to 100,000. And then, millions. Yet it was one of Moore’s victims, Kayla Law, who realised something was off. Well, besides the fact…
New York’s revenge-porn bill died early Thursday morning after the Senate adjourned for the year and took no action in the wake of an 11th-hour campaign by Google against the legislation. The proposal — which has languished in Albany since its introduction in 2013 and was recently taken up again after a Post exposé — would have made nonconsensual dissemination of sexually explicit images a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. It would have also helped victims sue Web hosts to remove the offending images. But Google mounted a late effort against the bill, with the Internet behemoth opposed to any government oversight over how it regulates content. Attorney Carrie Goldberg, who’d been leading lobbying efforts for the bill, was livid that senators went home without even taking a vote, effectively killing the legislation until next year. The only long-shot chance for the bill is if…
Thousands of UK men are victims to sextortion gangs according to figures released by the National Crime Agency (NCA). In 2017 1,304 cases of sextortion were reported to the NCA’s Anti-Kidnap and Extortion Unit (AKEU) by police forces across the UK. This is nearly three times more than the number of cases reported in 2015. Organised criminal gangs, often overseas, use fake online identities to befriend victims looking for genuine friendships online and persuade them to do sexual acts in front of a webcam. Gangs then use this footage to blackmail victims, threatening to share the video online. Roy Sinclair, operations manager from the National Crime Agency told ITV News some victims had been “in crisis” over being blackmail, and five people had taken their own lives. Both men and women can become targets. However according to the NCA young males aged 17 TO 25 and with an increasing…
Roughly six-in-ten U.S. teens have been bullied or harassed online, according to a new Pew Research Center report that explores teens’ experiences with cyberbullying and their views about it. Senior Researcher Monica Anderson discusses the methods and meaning behind the data. Bullying has been around for decades, centuries even. Cyberbullying is a newer manifestation of bullying. How did you define cyberbullying for this research? We’re aware that cyberbullying can be a very nuanced issue. Our own research has shown that what might be harassment to one person might not be considered harassment by another. Monica Anderson, senior researcher at Pew Research Center At the same time, other studies may use different measures to assess the prevalence of cyberbullying. For this project, we measured six specific incidents that teens might face online or on their cellphone: offensive name-calling, rumor-spreading, being sent explicit images without their consent, having explicit images of themselves…
