Taiwanese Net surfers have proved themselves to be a randy bunch by racking up most of their time online clicking sites offering pornographic material, according to results of a survey released yesterday.
In a three-month survey of Net surfing habits in Asia, Internet research firm Netvalue Taiwan discovered that local net surfers visited porn sites far more frequently and for much longer duration than any other type of site.
According to the results, Taiwan net surfers on average visited 2,556 porn sites over the survey period -- much more than the 1,485 portal sites that took second place -- and remained at the sites for around one hour per session.
Standings among the five countries surveyed -- China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore -- in terms of average time spent viewing porn sites per session saw Taiwan take second place with 62.3 minutes, behind Hong Kong at 69.7 minutes, according to the survey.
Most visitors to general adult sites were aged between 15 and 24, according to the survey, a figure likely to further worry social welfare organizations like the Garden of Hope Foundation (
Welfare organizations have claimed that the accessibility of graphic sexual and violent material on the Web to children could lead to negative behavior among Taiwan's youth.
But of course accessibility is the major attraction of online porn, according to a couple of keen Net surfers in Taiwan.
"You don't have to go through the embarrassment of buying a pornographic magazine from a newsagent," said one Net surfer, who requested anonymity.
"You can find anything you want, it's totally private and a lot of it is free" said another who claimed to spend around four hours per month scouring the Web for porn.
And while opposition to Web porn might be strong among welfare groups and parents, it is generally acknowledged that the porn industry helped to pave the way for Internet applications by developing software required for online purchasing and the download of detailed pictures.
In general, adult content sites tended to attract people from lower income groups, according to the survey, although one popular site jpadult.com (JP 成人網), which contains Chinese-language text and pictures of naked Asian girls, boasts that 34.5 percent of its visitors cpme from the middle income group.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS