Newsweek sparked a conflagration among conservative Christians last week by pointing out that Christian dating site BigChurch.com is owned by Penthouse Media Group.

This wouldn't have been big news to BigChurch members who bothered to look under the site's hood. The Christian dating site has been operated by social networking giant Various, Inc. (which runs AdultFriendFinder.com, Bondage.com and Penthouse.com) for years. Penthouse Media Group acquired BigChurch, along with dozens of other niche social networking sites, when it purchased Various last December.

As a result of the purchase, Penthouse is now just one brand among many in a corporation that focuses on social networking, says Penthouse Media Group CEO Marc Bell.

Some people still think of Penthouse as Playboy's dirty cousin, even though Penthouse changed hands in 2004 and is now trying to be one step raunchier than Maxim rather than one step classier than Anal Sluts 13.

But when an old-guard porn kingpin like Penthouse becomes just another niche, you know that times have changed. This focus on social networking supports my ongoing argument that the fantasy of porn will continue to yield to the fantasy of sex, and that savvy adult companies will keep up with these changing consumer expectations.

I also think the fantasy of sex, served by both mainstream dating sites and adult social networks, will open our wallets in ways online porn hasn't for years.

Of course, social media does not guarantee sex any more than porn does. But it provides the anticipation of sex, the possibility of sex, the idea that you just might get lucky. It's the premise of porn, manifested in reality. Almost.

Social networking promises a new experience each time. And free porn can only be an advantage in an adults-only social networking context. Just ask YouPorn.

If customers find themselves flirting and even cybering on a regular basis, they return again and again, paying for premium memberships until disillusionment sets in (why am I not getting laid for real?). Those who hook up in person remain members as long as the nookie is more fun than the drama.

Old-style softcore simply can't compete with that. Not because we don't like to look at it, but because we don't like to pay for it -- especially when we can see the same thing on the social networking sites while chatting with the women in the pictures.

It's not like BigChurch isn't about sex. It's just more subtle than a site that's explicitly aimed at swingers. BigChurch's function is to connect people whose concepts of sex are tied so closely to faith and doctrine that it can be difficult to meet potential partners in more traditional settings.

Many people who identify as Christians have a fairly secular attitude toward premarital sex, while others believe in sexual pleasure within marriage. A handful still relegate sex to procreation, and God forbid that you (or at least, she) enjoy it.

With all this variation, it's possible that Christians benefit more from online dating than even kinky people do, in that they don't waste as much time chatting up people who don't share their particular beliefs. After all, with an online matchmaker, it's just a matter of checking the right boxes.

Whether BigChurch can survive the public link to Penthouse Media Group remains to be seen. I'm not sure Penthouse would miss BigChurch if a membership exodus killed the Christian dating site. BigChurch says it has a mere half-million members, while AdultFriendFinder alone claims about 24 million.

Even selling BigChurch might be a challenge now, as the URL will carry the taint of blatant sexuality, unless whoever buys it can pull off a "saving BigChurch from the devil" marketing campaign.

Given that Penthouse Media Group owns all of the FriendFinder and Spring Street Networks sites, as well as the legendary Danni.com and several webcam networks, it's hard to see how losing one small property would make much of a dent.

It's the corporate version of the Question of Our Age: "What if my day job learns about my sex blog?" Only this time, sex will win, either way.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

- - -

Regina Lynn shows you how to have more fun with sex in her new book, Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier, available now.

SAN DIEGO -- Forget everything you've seen on CSI. In the information age, crime scene forensics are beginning to take a back seat to the science of recovering and sifting through evidence hidden on computers, cellphones and thumb drives.

Nowhere is that shift clearer than at the FBI's Regional Computer Forensics Lab here, which once lifted traces of incriminating Google searches from a suspect's hard drive to help convict him of murder. This week the lab became the sixth computer forensic lab in the nation to be accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, in another sign that computer forensics is no longer just about investigating hacker attacks.

"We've found video of gangsters rapping a song about a murder they committed," RCFL examiner John Leamons says.

The growth of law enforcement computer labs is an indication of how technology is increasingly involved in, or on the periphery of, criminal activity. San Diego-area law enforcement agencies founded the first regional forensic lab in 1998; there are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year the labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.

In its early days, the RCFL examiners not only recovered the data, they analyzed it for evidentiary value based on the particulars of the case. But with exponentially growing data and caseloads, the 22 examiners here now focus on collecting and preserving data in a manner that will hold up in court, then hand that data back to the police agency for analysis.

Not surprisingly, the most valuable information comes from the files that suspects thought they had deleted, but which remained hidden in the nooks and crannies of their hard drives. "The key to computer forensics is unallocated space," says Leamons, who is on loan to the lab from the San Diego Police Department.

No one can remember a case being kicked because the lab made an error, but they can remember cases where they found evidence that exonerated people charged with crimes, Leamons says.

Cellphones pose a particular challenge, says Rebecca Adimari, one of the five examiners who work on them.

"Each has its own operating system and frequency -- there's probably over 500 makes and models and not many of them are the same," she explains. "There can be so much evidence on there."

From the unique ringtone caught on camera during a holdup -- to the accidentally recorded conversations on voice notes, to the Israeli thug keeping notes of extortion visits on his PDA -- the way people use their phones can be pretty incriminating.

"When they arrested the Arellano Felix people (a gang of Mexican drug lords later convicted of murder and drug crimes in 2007), they recovered 14 phones including one with a photo of a machine gun," Adimari says.

She has hundreds of power and data cables, since they're all peculiar to individual phones. And she has a special box that blocks signals on the phones in the lab, so no information is lost or compromised.

Examiner Patrick Lim, from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services, says he recently recovered data from a hard drive that had been burnt to a crisp. Asked if it was from an arson or a murder, Lim says he can't reveal the details.

"It was burned. That's all I can say."

1962: A team of 12 doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reattaches the severed arm of an injured boy. It is the first successful reattachment of a human limb.

Freckle-faced Everett "Red" Knowles had been trying to hop a freight train in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was thrown against a stone wall that ripped his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks, using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve. A police ambulance rushed the 12-year-old across the Charles River to Boston, where emergency-room staff discovered the extent of his injury.

Surgeons had successfully attached partly severed limbs before, but never had the ideal candidate for a complete reimplantation, or replantation. Mass General's 30-year-old chief surgical resident, Dr. Ronald Malt, had Knowles' arm put on ice, and he assembled the team of experts he needed. All of the techniques they used that day had been used before, but never in the complete combination that saved an entire limb.

In hours of surgery, doctors reconnected the blood vessels, pinned the arm bone together, and grafted skin and muscle together, but they decided to wait to reattach the nerves. To their delight, Knowles' hand turned pink and a pulse returned to the wrist.

Malt became a celebrity. Knowles became a celebrity. The Little Leaguer got souvenirs and letters from Major Leaguers.

In September, doctors reattached four major nerve trunks. Within weeks, Knowles was complaining of severe pain in the arm, which in the unusual circumstances was a good sign.

A year after the surgery Knowles' arm and fingers were sensitive to heat, cold and touch, and he could move his fingers and bend his wrist. He could also play first base -- but only with his one good hand. The year after that, he was playing tennis and baseball. After four years of recovery, Knowles had the same use of his right arm and hand as a natural lefty. He eventually drove a six-wheel truck and lifted sides of beef at his job.

By 1966, surgeons had performed dozens of similar operations, failing at least half the time. That led to a editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that limb replantation be performed only if the patient is under 30 with no other major injury, with the severed limb in good shape, and is in a hospital with top-flight medical facilities. For all other cases, JAMA wrote, an artificial limb might be the better solution.

Source: Various

The experts at the FBI's newly accredited Regional Computer Forensics Lab in San Diego have already helped solve murders, child porn cases and robberies. They're among the best in the nation at pulling evidence from hard drives, cellphones and memory cards.

There are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year, the FBI labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.

Wired.com got a rare look at the inner workings of the San Diego lab this week, and we snapped some photos of the toys inside.

Left: Darrell Foxworth greets members of the media in the entrance of the San Diego Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory.

Jeff Cable, assistant director of RCFL, opens the door in to the lab to start the tour. Cable notes that it is very rare that they ever allow anyone but FBI agents through this door.

This device copies the data off the hard drives and makes sure it can't be overwritten.

FBI agent Dan Dandridge plugs a hard drive into a "lunch box," which clones the data off the drive as the first step of a noninvasive examination.

Cellphones can be a treasure-trove of forensic evidence. In one case, a man was robbing a store when his cellphone rang. Captured by a security camera, and studied by the lab, the robber's unique ringtone eventually led to his conviction.

This set of equipment is the AVID video processing system at the San Diego Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.

Forensic examiner Tim Hamon shows off the inside of the RCFL mobile unit.

Lacking in subtlety, the rolling lab is not used in covert surveillance missions.

For decades, scientists have dreamed of computer chips that manipulate light rather than electricity. Unlike electrons, photons can cross paths without interfering with each other, so optical chips could compute in three dimensions rather than two, crunching data in seconds that now takes weeks to process.

For now, though, optical computing remains a dream. The chips require crystals that channel photons as nimbly as silicon channels electrons -- and though engineers have been able to imagine the ideal photonic crystal, they've been unable to build it.

Enter a beetle known as Lamprocyphus augustus. In a study published this week in Physical Review E, researchers at the University of Utah describe how the inch-long Brazilian beetle's iridescent green scales are composed of chitin arranged by evolution in precisely the molecular configuration that has confounded the would-be fabricators of optical computers.

By using the scales as a semiconductor mold, researchers hope to finally build the perfect photonic crystal.

"We haven't been able to manufacture materials at the nanometer resolution. We knew the ideal structure, but we couldn't make it," said study co-author Michael Bartl, a University of Utah chemist.

Bartl's team stumbled across L. augustus by sheer luck. Study co-author Lauren Richey, now a Brigham Young University undergraduate, studied beetle iridescence for a high school science fair project. She asked BYU biologist John Gardner, also a co-author of the study, to examine L. augustus with his lab's electron microscope.

When the researchers scoped the scales, they noticed something strange: No matter the angle of viewing, the scales always appeared in the same shade of green.

That's unusual for iridescent surfaces, which derive their color from light refracted through semi-transparent layers. Further study revealed that the quality came from the scales' molecular arrangement, which had the same pattern as the atoms of carbon in a diamond.

Diamonds themselves are too dense to serve as photonic crystals, but researchers long ago identified their configuration as perfectly suited for manipulating light in a three-dimensional space.

"You can take the light, criss-cross it and it doesn't interfere. It allows you to build more complex and compact architectures," said Paul Braun, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign photonic crystal specialist. The crystals' transmission purity would also eliminate waste heat generated by traditional electron-based circuits. That heat is a limiting factor on traditional microchip capacities.

Laboratory attempts at mimicking diamonds have been largely unsuccessful. Braun said that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories came close, but each crystal took a painstaking month to build.

"They're almost impossible to fabricate," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Georgia Institute of Technology material scientist. Wang developed photonic crystals based on the scales of butterfly wings, but they didn't possess the elusive diamond form. "If this beetle has an arrangement like diamonds, that's truly unique."

Bartl said that optical computer chips won't actually run on beetle scales. Instead he plans to use the scales as a mold, replacing chitin with semiconductor material.

"This could motivate another round of serious science," said Braun. "If there's an easy way to create the diamond structure, that's going to expedite progress in the field."

"Optical computers could do in a second what now takes days or weeks," said Bartl. "And we're providing the materials."

A year ago this June, Taliban fighters streamed into the remote town of Chora in southern Afghanistan expecting an easy victory over impoverished villagers. Instead, they met heavy resistance from scores of uniformed Afghan men.

Those so-called Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP), all formerly in the service of local warlords, had received two months of training by Dutch and American soldiers and were now the first line of defense against the Taliban.

Arming tribesmen was a risky idea. True, this sort of tribal initiative had been effective in Iraq. But NATO commanders feared that Afghan loyalties to their warlords ran too deep. NATO was “arming people who were not necessarily in line with the [Afghan] government,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Robert Cone told Wired.com.

So, last month, NATO fired the auxiliary cops and scrapped the tribal strategy, leaving gaping holes in Afghanistan's defenses. The fix? Marines, of course, armed with fingerprint pads, iris scanners and electronic databases.

With these biometric tools, the Marines are planning to recruit new cops who have no ties to tribal warlords. “We know there are some shadow police and some militia-type police,” Lt. Col. Ray Hall, the Marine commander, said. “Once we go through the vetting process, we'll have everybody screened … so that problem should go away.”

That means scanning every new recruit's unique iris “eye prints,” logging their thumb prints and feeding it all into a growing, but still very spotty, national database linked to criminal and intelligence records. If a cop has any known warlord ties, he's disqualified from serving.

CIA teams used FBI biometrics while hunting for known Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in 2001, and since then, the military has gathered data on almost every Afghan it comes in regular contact with.

There's one more problem. Not all the military databases can talk to one another. “We haven't standardized,” said Larry Schneider, a Northrop Grumman VP who last year was working on collapsing many biometrics systems into just one.

Until everyone is looking at the same data, seditious Afghan cops will probably keep falling through the cracks.

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Who knew that Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos chose his wife in part because he felt she could, if necessary, get him out of a third-world prison? Long after most other dotcom founders have moved on, Bezos, 44, remains one of the internet’s success stories. In 2007, his business pulled in revenue of nearly $15 billion, up 38 percent from the previous year. Amazon’s stock keeps rising, and Bezos becomes ever richer. His estimated worth is about $8 billion.

The 13-year-old company is the biggest online retailer in the world, but recently Bezos has taken Amazon beyond retailing; it now sells its computing, warehousing, and delivery services to other companies. Even tiny startups can rent just about anything Amazon does. And the company made news with its debut of the Kindle, a slim electronic book reader with iPhone-like cachet.

Yet Bezos is not without challenges. Slowing consumer spending could put the kibosh on Amazon's growth, even though it just hired 500 more employees and is building a new distribution center. The company is also pushing hard into the market for digital downloads of music and movies, taking on entrenched leader Apple. Most ominously, Google recently announced that it would launch a competing, and free, service for small businesses called Google Apps.

Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney interviewed Bezos before a packed auditorium at New York University's Stern School of Business. The following is an edited transcript. (Watch video.)

Portfolio: You're hiring 500 people and building a new distribution center. Aren't you worried about the economy?

Jeff Bezos: The fourth quarter of last year was tough for a lot of consumer companies, and we had a terrific Q4. We’re probably not a good leading indicator for the economy as a whole, just because we don’t have a lot of operating history.

Portfolio: Let's talk about the Kindle. What do you want it to be?

Bezos: Any book, in any language, ever in print should be available in less than 60 seconds. We worked on it for three years. It's been selling out since being released.

Portfolio: You sold how many?

Bezos: You asked that so innocently, but you know I'm not going to answer. We have a long-standing practice of being very shy about disclosure, and I'll stick to that practice. The Kindle has substantially exceeded our expectations.

Portfolio: Every effort at e-books has failed. Why should this one work?

Bezos: We decided we were going to improve upon the book. And the first thing we did was try to determine the essential features of a physical book that we needed to replicate. The No. 1 feature is that it disappears. When you're in the middle of reading, you don’t notice the ink or the glue or the stitching or the paper — all of that disappears, and you're in the author's world. Most electronic devices today do not disappear. Some of them are extraordinarily rude. Books get out of the way, and they leave you in that state of mental flow.

Portfolio: How do you improve on that?

Bezos: We looked at things that physical books could never do. One of them is that you can look up any word that you're reading. It used to be that if I came across a word that I didn't know, I guessed from context. I'm astonished at what a bad guesser I am. Now that I’m looking up the words, I'm like, "Huh. Really?"

Portfolio: When you founded Amazon, how did you decide to sell books?

Bezos: I went to a catalogers association and started looking at product categories that do well by mail order: No. 1 was apparel, and gourmet food was very high. Way down on the list, like No. 20, was books. But there are more items in the book category than any other. We thought we could build a store with a complete selection. Big book superstores have about 150,000 titles. When Amazon launched in 1995, it had a million. With that kind of founding idea, we drove across the country.

Portfolio: You and your wife.

Bezos: My wife and I. She drove while I wrote the business plan. I wanted to incorporate the company before I got to Seattle. With internet usage growing 2,300 percent a year, dillydallying would have been a bad idea. I called my friend in Seattle and said, "Can you recommend a Seattle lawyer who can incorporate the company?" And he recommended his divorce attorney. Amazon was incorporated by a divorce attorney.

Portfolio: Are you always extremely methodical about major decisions?

Bezos: With business decisions, yes. With personal decisions, I find that my methodical nature can confuse me, and so I think more about personal decisions, like what job you really want to take or whom you want to marry. Although I did have criteria for that.

Portfolio: You had a list for a spouse?

Bezos: I kind of did. It was a short list. I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison. It was really just a visualization for resourcefulness, because people who are not resourceful drive me bananas.

Portfolio: What's a gut call you made?

Bezos: Amazon Prime. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, $79, that gives you free two-day shipping on everything you buy for a year. When you do the math on that, it always tells you not to do it.

Portfolio: One of your big initiatives, a search engine called A9, fell flat. What happened?

Bezos: If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.

Portfolio: Did you ever get criticized for some thing you tried that worked out?

Bezos: When we pioneered customer reviews, it was incredibly controversial. I got letters from publishers saying, "You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Take down those negative customer reviews." We’ve never done anything of real value that wasn't at least a little bit controversial when we did it. But if you want to be a pioneer, you have to be comfortable being misunderstood.

Portfolio: In 2007, Amazon had a phenomenal year. Revenue grew 38 percent—is that the right number?

Bezos: Yeah, something like that.

Portfolio: Aren't you supposed to know?

Bezos: I'm thinking a few years out. I've already forgotten those numbers.

Portfolio: OK. Well, talk about the past year, if you can. Why is Amazon still growing at that pace?

Bezos: Not only is the business growing; those rates are accelerating. There are a couple of factors driving that, all related to the big drivers of our business, which are selection, convenience, fast delivery, and low prices. Our international business is doing well.

Portfolio: What is Amazon's revenue split internationally?

Bezos: It's 55 percent in the U.S., 45 outside the U.S.

Portfolio: The music business is changing rapidly. What do you think is going to happen?

Bezos: Well, long term, it doesn't make sense for music to be distributed on physical media. That transition has been going on for seven years and probably will continue for a number of years.

Portfolio: Was Amazon late to the game in online music sales?

Bezos: Well, certainly, you know, there's a very big player in that space, and they’re doing very well.

Portfolio: And who would that be?

Bezos: I’m not sure. I forget. [Laughter] I have a list somewhere in my office. But we've worked for three years in ways that it's hard for outsiders to see. We didn’t want to launch a music service that wasn't based on the MP3 format. The iPod has such significant share. Otherwise, we would visualize the bullet points about our service, and we could have all these great points and then the last bullet point would have to be, "Oh, and it won't play on your iPod." So our patience has paid off in that regard. We now have a service that will play with any device.

Portfolio: Microsoft buying Yahoo—how would that impact Amazon?

Bezos: Oh, I have no idea.

Portfolio: How is the effort to lease your company's computing power and business capabilities to other companies going? We worked on our infrastructure Web services for four years. We launched our first one, the Simple Storage Service, two years ago, and I am astonished—I rarely hear about a startup company that isn't using our services. Now we're starting to get deployment inside corporate data centers. So it's very exciting.

Portfolio: Google recently announced that it's entering into that business and will give some of those same services away for free. What does that mean to you?

Bezos: We really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, is not going to have one winner. There are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, offering different kinds of products.

Portfolio: You’ve become a very wealthy man. What are you going to do with your money?

Bezos: Good question. I don't know. My parents are running the Bezos Family Foundation, and they're focused on education. I'm still focused on Amazon, but I have some ideas. I'll keep them to myself for now.

Portfolio:So you won't tell us?

Bezos: No.

1973: Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center writes a memo outlining how to connect the think tank's new personal computers to a shared printer. The memo puts forth the basic properties of -- and names -- ethernet.

Metcalfe had been an MIT undergraduate whiz kid and Harvard grad student working on computers and how to network them. Even before completing his Ph.D., he went to work for Xerox PARC, which assigned him the task of designing and building the first network for PCs.

PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was the first time that computers were small enough for hundreds to be in the same building, and the network had to be fast to drive the printer.

Metcalfe circulated his plan in a memo titled "Alto Ethernet." It contained a rough schematic drawing and suggested using coaxial cable for the connections and using data packets like Hawaii's AlohaNet or the Defense Department's Arpanet. The system was up and running Nov. 11, 1973.

Metcalfe didn't base the name ethernet on the anesthetic that puts people to sleep. It refers instead to a discredited scientific theory of the luminiferous aether, an undifferentiated universal medium that some 18th- and 19th-century scientists thought necessary for the propagation of light. Metcalfe saw it as an apt metaphor for a medium that would propagate information.

Metcalfe shares four patents for ethernet. He and PARC colleague David Boggs published the concept in a 1976 paper, "Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For LANs." That was the same year Metcalfe convinced Xerox, DEC and Intel -- the three funding companies -- to let ethernet become an open networking standard. It eventually supplanted competing technologies like IBM's Token Ring and General Motors' Token Bus to become the predominant standard for local-area networks.

Metcalfe went on to found 3Com ("computers, communication, compatibility") in 1979. He left after losing an internal power struggle in 1990 and became a widely read columnist for Info World. Today he's a general partner at the VC firm Polaris Ventures.

He's also known for Metcalfe's Law: The value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users.

Want to wish ethernet a Happy Birthday? Send this page to your office printer -- by ethernet, of course.

Source: "The Legend of Bob Metcalfe," Wired 6.11