When Peter moved his business to an office in Santa Clara, he upgraded our home internet connection to cable modem, so that he could have the bandwidth to remotely access his computer and do programming at home. But, as it turns out, he still has to go to the Santa Clara office if he wants to work at night. Why? Because our network slows to a crawl at around 7:30 pm and remains so until the wee hours of the morning.
We were momentarily puzzled, until I provided the obvious answer: someone else in our neighborhood, on the same cable modem bandwidth is either downloading or uploading massive amounts of pornography. Whether we like it or not, a massively scary percentage of the internet is a porn-delivery service. I’d like to disbelieve it myself, but even the majority of hits to my site come due to my nickname for a current English celebutard.
But a single person can’t download massive amounts for hours on end night after night, can they? So my conclusion, which I shared with Peter, was that there is a secret porn ring in our neighborhood, whose movies, pictures, or whatever, are being accessed every evening by thousands. At first Peter scoffed, pointing out that there is no one in our neighborhood who looks like a porn star. I countered with the fact that having once stumbled across the escort ads which take up half of the Las Vegas yellow pages, tastes vary greatly, and services have sprung up to serve the more esoteric desires. Someone out there may really be turned on by bald Hispanic guys and/or fat middle-aged women, and our neighborhood pr0n ring may just be the place to serve their needs.