Said Judge John Grady:

"Sheriff [Thomas] Dart may continue to use Craigslist's Web site to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content. But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct."

Since the sheriff filed his suit in March, Craigslist has renamed the section "adult services" and imposed rules requiring a working phone number and valid credit card from, err, adult service providers. This doesn't seem to have impacted business much. But that's actually a good thing for the sheriff: since hookers will continue to flock to Craigslist, which cooperates with police, Dart can continue to use the site as a choke point for large-scale prostitution busts, as he has in the past. He just can't demonize the site for his own political posturing.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua dubiously reported the existence of a Swedish town called Chako Paul City, a town of 25,000 forbidden to men and guarded by two blonde female sentries who will beat your male ass "half to death" if you try entering. But the report raised as many questions as it answered; for example, it implies visiting men would be left half alive after their ladybeatings, and perhaps might be permitted to penetrate the town's gates and receive gentle care in one of the town's many hotels and restaurants, for "receiving women from around the world."

Chinese men have "swamped... Swedish tourism bodies" (ahem) with such burning questions in recent days, according to the Australian, and millions of them are "crippling the country's internet providers" frantically searching for more details. Yet not one kind, enterprising Web designer has set up a tourism website on their behalf, complete with a ridiculous quantity of AdSense banners and a members-only "Inside the Bathhouses of Chako Paul City" section. Hop to, internet!

(Pic by adamkaras on Flickr)

Instead of posting nude photos with their "massage" and "escort" ads, providers now post bikini pictures, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. And instead of explaining how many times you can have sex with them, they now "quote their prices in roses per hour." This is all wayyy too confusing for customers, says the "Erotic Service Providers Union," proving decisively the Craigslist has the dumbest johns on the planet.

And furthermore, why is this important news just now coming out 18 months after the NYPD allegedly stopped setting up stings on Craigslist hookers and johns? Whoa, so many questions! You're quite interested in Craigslist hooker information, wow!

It's simple really: ABC newsman George Weber got murdered by a 16-year-old he found on Craigslist, which, by the ironclad rules of Media Scandal Follow-Up Stories, means that it's time to delve into the seedy world of online prostitution, and what it means for YOU.

And whattayaknow, it's safe to go finding hookers on Craigslist again:

The Vice Squad Craigslist program was shut down about 18 months ago, sources told The Post. But NYPD spokesman Paul Browne insisted it happened as long as three years ago because a new commanding officer of the squad thought it was "a waste of resources."

Yokel Craigslist-suing Sheriff Thomas Dart could learn something from the NYPD. This is all part of a larger social contract. Cops agree to stay off Craigslist while they're on duty, and in return, we don't hold them to be hypocrites when they hire hookers from Craigslist while they're off duty. [NYP]

Jurvetson was just minding his business at an A-list inaugural celebration, on line in the men's room, when he witnessed one of the few arrests associated with the overwhelmingly peaceful inauguration, he wrote on Flickr:

A buzzing group of eight cops berated, ‘cuffed and extracted a young couple that looked terribly embarrassed and a bit tipsy. The offense: copulating in public. Oh yes, it was a veritable love fest!
I had to wait my turn, as I was the next occupant of their “bridal suite” – the one stall in the men’s room.

Jurvetson isn't the first to float the idea of Obama sex. But he's an innovator with the title he posted above his story on photo hub Flickr: "Inaugural Balling."

From one snarky headline factory to another, Mr. Jurvetson, we salute you.

(Photo via Jurvetson's Flickr.)

(Thanks to Megan for the pointer.)

"In the latest issue of the legendary magazine, readers are invited to take a phone cam image of a logo for the new made-for-mobile video series Interns and send it to Playboy to receive a link to the weekly show. Interns tracks the learning curve of three young minimum wage earners in the Playboy New York marketing office, overseen by a dashing boss. The 4-minute episodes encapsulate the typical reality TV challenges, such as soliciting Cyber Babes."

I don't even understand what this is about, except that Playboy is still smart enough to only give away fully clothed intern photos for free. [MinOnline; pic via]

1. The Dramatic Opening Scene:

2. Bar Scene One: Tucker Max Has A Way With Women And Dudes Better Not Give Him Any Shit Bro:

3. Bar Scene Two: Tucker Max Can Steal Your Sorostitute You Dumb Frat Boy So Watch Out Bro:

If we have the stomach, we'll bring you more lowlights soon bro!

Despite the fact that the basic facts of the evening seem to be proven, Wikipedia's power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add "In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair"—all true and verified by more "reliable" sources!—and it wouldn't last two minutes. (Actually you couldn't add that. The entry has been locked.) It's not notable enough for them, apparently. Though this is. And hell, so is this!

But no, the details of the probable end of the political aspirations of one of the 2000s most visible Democratic politicians are just not as notable as the fictional history of the Wookee homeworld.

(Kudos, of course, to the enterprising editor who buried mention of this scandal in this unread entry on a book by Rielle Hunter's ex-boyfriend Jay McInerney.)

We don't allow nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. This includes making sexual advances toward other users.

Of course, how exactly to you define "nudity" when you're talking about animated avatars? Of course, you can hug all you want, but drawing the line between friendly embrace and creepy come-on is not something that can be algorithmically determined. It's obvious that the company is desperate to avoid any publicity that associates it with anything related to sex. Which is a shame, because if there's anything more "mainstream" than the sexual reproduction which perpetuates our species, I'd like to know what it is. Where do Larry and Sergey think the Kinderplex's overpriced clientele come from? (Photos by rcooper)

• 10. Prostitutes: Absolutely nothing surprising about that, since there are more tech titans of our acquaintance known to prefer quantitative intimacy to qualitative intimacy, as it's just so much more efficient.
• 9. Code words: Anyone familiar for looking for an apartment on Craigslist should know what "420 friendly" means. What's slightly surprising is that Nicholas used such common slang as "party favors" when arranging a score. Your run-of-the-mill paranoid drug dealer is more creative.
• 8. Minions: That Nicholas employed flunkies and other hangers-on to do his dirty work isn't particularly surprising, either. But that he had employees on Broadcom's payroll running errands for him certainly raises an eyebrow. And cost him $1 million in hush money.
• 7. Doctor shopping: To get the amounts of Vicoprofen (hydrocodone and ibuprofen) and Valium (diazepam) Nicholas wanted on hand, he had scripts written up for associates. With a private jet, why not just fly down to Mexico and stock up? That seems easier. One smuggling run is a lot less risky than dozens of doctor visits.
• 6. Drink spiking: While spiking another executive's drink with ecstasy would normally be pretty surprising, I'm pretty sure more than a few techies have been accidentally dosed at Burning Man. What shocks me was that it as at a Super Bowl party in New Orleans. I though techies hated team sports!
• 5. Wire transfers: For a guy who was on all sorts of stimulants, he was surprisingly blasé about being surveilled. Leaving multiple records of five-figure drug deals is the first clue that this guy felt invincible. That he broke the $10,000 rule to keep transactions under the IRS's radar is no-no No. 2.
• 4. Budgets, invoices and petty cash: Leave it to a businessman to have fellow junkies draw up a budget for a Super Bowl party, have dealers submit invoices for large orders of MDMA and direct Broadcom employees to keep $10,000 on hand at all times for Nicholas's whims.
• 3. Death threats: Even Robert Evans, when angered, probably only threw around some verbal abuse on the order of "You'll never work in this town again." But a tech geek reverting to mafia tactics? That's new.
• 2. Hotboxing a plane: By "causing marijuana smoke and fumes to enter the cockpit" of his private plane on a flight to Nevada, Nicholas may go down in history. That seems more like something the boys of Entourage would do, not something an Orange County entrepreneur would indulge in, rock star friends or no.
• 1. Woodstock '99: Even more surprising is that a guy who issued death threats would go to an anniversary of the world's most famous love-in. I mean, I knew Woodstock '99 was a corporate sham, but little did I know exactly how corporate things were when apparently a tech titan (and football fan) was slinging tablets of ecstasy to concertgoers.

Google Guys / Friends of Google Guys - w4m
Reply to: pers-591790503@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-02-29, 8:55PM

First off, to all the dipshits who made me have to do this over and over: I'm fucking real so keep your fucking cursor off the fucking flag button.
Fuck. Damn this ad is weird. OK well here goes:

If you don't work at google or personally know anyone who works at google/youtube, you need to hit the back button now because you won't have a chance at sexing me. I warned you this was a weird ad.
Basically one of my youtube videos was disabled because of some douchebag and I'm trying to get it re-enabled. I've sent complaints, emails, everything, but damned if they can fucking hear me. This isn't some shitty little home video either, it got 300,000+ views and thousands of ratings and I WANT IT BACK. So bad that I'm willing to sex you if you can make it happen.

Let's be clear here: I DON'T want your money, I DON'T want your pics/dick shots/whatever, and I DON'T want to hear from you if you can't pull a string at google.

If you send me some unrelated bullshit email that in no way, shape, or form, addresses your ability to restore my youtube video, I will add your email address to the North American Man/Boy Love Association mailing list.

We clear? Good.

I can only assume if you've made it this far that what I'm asking is within your power, so what can you expect in return? Well for starters, I'm on birth control so you'll get to cum inside me. (I doubt that silicon valley nerds are high STD risks.) I like getting my hair-pulled, my ass smacked, and I love sucking dick. Like, LOVE it. Most of the time I prefer it to sex. In general, be rough with me, be a man. No anal though. I tried it once and couldn't walk straight for two days. No anal. None.

Send me a message to get the video ID of the youtube video I want restored, and once I see it's back online, we'll make arrangements to meet.

(Photo by ideali)

Update: Gene Simmons's lawyer has confirmed the sex tape's authenticity in a cease-and-desist letter sent to Valleywag. With Simmons's identity established, we've shortened the excerpts to the bare minimum: Simmons's face, unquestionable; the activity he's engaging in, unmentionable.

In the summer of 1968, running for reelection, I attended the endorsement evening sponsored by an early gay group called Society for Individual Rights. Identify yourself as a gay person back then and you could lose your job. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses, lawyers who were gay couldn't afford to join groups like SIR. But I wanted endorsements and believed in people being able to live unhindered lives.

Every candidate closed by saying, "And I will vote to enact the model penal code" — a sweeping revision of California's general penal code. Each time, the place would go ripshit crazy with applause. One of its modifications would remove criminal penalties for certain sex acts like oral copulation or anal intercourse between consenting adults. But the model penal code would involve more than 400 changes to California law. No bill that contained 400 changes was going to pass. So the pols who were up there promising weren't telling the whole truth, and they weren't really intent on solving the problem. When I rose to speak, I said, "You are interested in one section of the code only. Why don't we just move to eliminate the criminal penalties for sex acts between consenting adults?" The place really went crazy.

When decriminalization finally became law eight years later, it wasn't because there was a grand consensus. No, passing the bill required one of the most daring — and fun — political capers I ever was involved in. It wasn't all political opportunism. The legislation also emerged from a sense of outrage. My outrage. The penalties didn't affect just gays; they affected everyone. You couldn't hold a teacher's license, be a member of the bar, or hold a nurse's license if you had run afoul of this law. I represented a woman who was a passenger in a car being driven across the Golden Gate Bridge by her boyfriend. She was performing a sex act on him. The toll taker noticed and called the police. The woman lost her license as a teacher. In another case, a San Francisco man lost his professional license and livelihood because he was making out in his apartment one night with his boyfriend when a neighbor observed. To witness the scene, she had to climb up on the toilet seat in her loo, stretch to peer out a window, and then down into the window below. The guys were busted for crimes against nature.

So every year, we kept introducing the bill. By 1975, I could envisage a good result. So we went for it. George Moscone, presiding in the senate, figured out a daring way to get the bill through that house, where we figured we could get a vote of twenty for and twenty against. Like the early candidates who promised to support the reform of the entire penal code while realizing the promise was an empty gesture, many senators who were voting for the bill were actually hoping it would die in a tie.

The bill would only pass if Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally broke the tie. We had to get senators to believe that would never happen. So Moscone, Dymally, and I arranged for the lieutenant governor to be on a well-publicized trip to Colorado. On that day, we brought the bill up for a voice vote in the senate [a vote in which it is not recorded who voted yea or nay]. To get the twenty pro votes, I had to convince another black, Nate Holden, to give me a commitment that if I needed his vote I could count on it. I couldn't tell Nate what the real deal was until the vote was twenty to nineteen.

After a morning of ferocious debate, people were frothing! When the vote came to twenty and twenty, Moscone did what no one expected: He locked the senators in their chamber. No one could leave. He instituted some parliamentary maneuvers to make it almost impossible for senators to change their votes. Dymally was summoned from Colorado. In those days, there were no private jets available to us. So we had to get Dymally on a commercial flight from Denver to San Francisco. Then the Highway Patrol would helicopter him into Sacramento. It took five hours.

At 7:30 p.m. Dymally entered the chamber, voted yea, and broke the tie. Sexual acts between consenting adults in California were decriminalized. In that same month, Moscone and I passed legislation to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Then we improved welfare benefits. None of these great social improvements would have come about unless some of us were willing to use old-fashioned skill and political daring. No progress ever takes place unless you're also willing to be tough and canny.

The irony, of course, is that the offending lifecaster is Gawker Media video staff member Nick McGlynn, who works for Valleywag's publisher and prepares some video clips for this site. He's also responsible for the slightly less riveting, but featured, Gawker book-party broadcast.

As a result of "sexual acts" appearing in McGlynn's live stream, Justin.tv has issued new community guidelines, which try to emphasize broadcasters' freedom to police their own streams, but ends by banning a host of activities that many would consider a part of their daily life, including "documented unauthorized real-world contact." I don't know what that means but it sounds ominous.

McGlynn, however, never imagined that a lifecasting site would restrict, you know, lifecasting. He didn't see any issue with broadcasting a stream of his own nakedness or sex with his girlfriend. McGlynn, in his own words via IM:

i didn't know it wasn't allowed, who reads the TOS anyway
haha
they should have made it more prominent, i mean if you are going to have your whole life online
half my life is spent naked
and sex is a quarter of that half
ha
i won't do it again, but seems silly that you can't

i just started it that morning
so it wasn't a big loss for me

well they should create a section for over 18 cams
it would give a more "real view" on peoples lives if they didn't have to turn the camera away durning naked times

first of all
nobody ever read TOS
ever
people just click agree
if there is something very imporant like "you can't be naked" then include that somewhere else
like a check box, saying "i agree to not be naked"

i just find it funny that everyone is making this much of a deal about it
people in america are so weird when it comes to sex and nudity
i haven't heard from them since, i don't know what repercussions there would be, they already closed my account so i can't broadcast

why not just up the age from 13 to 18 and say anything goes
if there are 13 year olds broadcasting there life on cam that is creepier than nudity anyday in my book

Sex position or World of Warcraft spell? (answers at bottom of page)
1. Cat Form
2. Stargazing
3. Earth Shock
4. Backstab
5. Bull Horn
6. Rainbow Arch
7. Charge
8. Aimed Shot
9. Crushing Spices
10. Clinging Creeper
11. Battle Stance
12. Double-edged Knife

Five LOLcat ways to say no to sex!
1. Abstinent cat is abstinent
2. Iz that time of monf
3. I made you a Viagra, but I eated it.
4. Sumbuddy stole mah fukket
5. DO NOT WANT

Match the Internet people to the sex toy:
1. Star Wars Kid
2. Thriller Prisoners
3. Ask a Ninja
4. Leeroy Jenkins

A. The Python Extra-Large Double Dong
B. Trojan Extended Pleasure with Climax Control
C. Vibrating Silver Bullet
D. Fuzzy nunchucks

(Answer: None. The above people all need the touch of a real woman)

Computer dangers that you could also get from sex
Did you know that some people somewhere are using the Internet instead of having sex? Here's why!

• Chances of back ache, carpal tunnel are just the same
• Google doesn't laugh at questions
• Lower-risk poking
• Less shame after "404 Not Found"
• Finally an activity that lasts longer than two minutes

Answers
Positions: 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12
Spells: 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11

Artwork from Your Lost. Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. Actually, he's having sex right now.

Warning: Because Justin cut his mic, his cohorts filled the silence with a NSFW audio feed from a porno. Put on some headphones.

Click To Play

Pathetic. What happened to Justin's promise to keep on the cam during sex? Here's a guess: Justin, having found a girl he really enjoys spending time with, felt he'd rather share a private moment with her than come through on his commitment with viewers.

Justin has set up a dangerous precedent over the past few days. His self-censorship has gone beyond practical measures (like disabling his microphone during a bank visit to protect his account information); Justin started disabling his microphone and/or camera during business meetings, phone calls, and now intimate moments.

What the hell? Isn't total access the point of lifecasting? It was central to earlier broadcasters like 90s camgirl Jennicam and the residents of We Live In Public's webcam-fitted warehouse. And sex tied into the philosophy behind The Real House.

The Real House, like other "Big Brother"-style live-to-web homes, offered more exhibitionism than allowed on network TV. But unlike most, the display of intimacy seemed not exploitative but invitational. For example, the Real House launched a monthly project called "Globalgasm," in which house members led Internet users around the world in an attempted simultaneous orgasm.

Real House member John "Halcyon" Styn said Globalgasm was inspired by a scene in the original Star Wars. Jedi master Obi-wan Kenobi feels the pain of an entire planet dying at once. Could one create such a force in a positive way? Viewers were invited to tune in and cum with the household.

And thus the Real House cast off the usually prurient feel, already diluted by the honesty and non-titillation of Jennicam's on-camera lovemaking, of live-to-web sex. The Real House lovefest wasn't a free porno show; it was a chance to share one of humanity's most universal pleasures. The peep show became an orgy.

And that's why Justin's cop-out is such a disappointment. Last night, my friends sent a flurry of messages on the group message system Twitter. Both men and women were thrilled at the prospect of watching Justin get it on:

These weren't lonely guys getting their rocks off. These people love watching Justin like they love watching Heroes. They liked Justin, they liked J, and they were about to share a milestone for Internet TV after rooting for their hero.

And then the screen went black.

"I actually watched the chat thread for a LONG time after the lights went out," said my friend Rex ("Fimoculous" above) about the on-site chat rooms. "It was seriously like its own show." He continued:

Mostly, it was people who were outraged, wanting to boycott... and then something funny would happen... someone from ROOM1 would drop into ROOM5 and say "We're all boycotting Justin, are you in." And everyone in ROOM5 would scream.

And then, someone showed up who allegedly knew him in real life from a long time ago, and told stories about him. and everyone ate it up.

It was just so weird to watch this while a black video stream played above. It was like a bunch of kids who didn't know what to do once the TV was turned off.

Some connection was made here, but despite Justin's shyness and less important. By retreating, Justin reinforced the idea of on-screen sex as not a shared moment but an exploitative spectator event.

The Justin.tv team plans to launch more shows; their favorite concept is a real-life "Sex in the City" character in New York. For the good of the Internet public, let's hope they find someone less like Justin and more like Halcyon and the Real Housemates.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Blogebrity, and Look Shiny. He would have left the camera on, but then again, he wouldn't wear it in the first place.