All about tortures

Adult film director Max Hardcore sentenced to 4 years in prison on obscenity charges

- 47 minutes ago

(Video: an intro that precedes the movies of Max Hardcore; no nudity or sexual acts in this embedded video above). A US District Court in Florida has sentenced "extreme shock porn" gonzo director and distributor Max Hardcore, aka Paul F. Little, to four years in prison over obscenity charges. Writing for Salon, Glenn Greenwald wrote that he believes the verdict is a blow to first amendment rights: “So, to recap, in the Land of the Free: if you’re an adult who produces a film using other consenting adults, for the entertainment of still other consenting adults, which merely depicts fictional acts of humiliation and degradation, the DOJ will prosecute you and send you to prison for years. The claim that no real pain was inflicted will be rejected; mere humiliation is enough to make you a criminal. But if government officials actually subject helpless detainees in their custody to extreme mental abuse, degradation, humiliation and even mock executions long considered “torture” in the entire civilized world, the DOJ will argue that they have acted with perfect legality and, just to be sure, Congress will hand them retroactive immunity for their conduct. That’s how we prioritize criminality and arrange our value system.” The hometown Tampa, FL paper where Little was convicted wrote about the case in a condemning tone: His pornographic persona, Max Hardcore, is all swagger and sadism â€“ forcing women in his movies to do things that can't be described in a family newspaper. But in federal court today, as he faced a federal prison sentence, Paul F. Little trembled and begged a woman for mercy. "It just seems a very high price to pay, I think," Little told U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew, "and I ask you to understand how much I've suffered." Judge Sentences Porn Producer To 46 Months In Prison (Tampa Bay Online). Similar accounts published in Max Hardcore's home town paper, The Pasadena (CA) Star-News, and in this Tampa Bay paper. Why was Little, aka Hardcore, convicted in Florida, when the offending material was produced elsewhere and distributed in many places, even overseas? IANAL, but as I understand it: producers are subject to obscenity charges in any state the material can be downloaded when local standards deem the material to be obscene. The landmark Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell is informative background reading. The most authoritative voice I have read on the Max Hardcore case is that of Susannah Breslin, whose work I've blogged here many times. If you read one piece on this story, read hers. Unlike most (perhaps all) of the voices you'll read on this topic, she's actually spent time on the kind of porn sets where "shock producers" like Hardcore preside, and she's watched more of his work than I could ever stomach. I can't speak for her, but I think the point of this powerful essay she's just published is this: the story is complicated. If we're going to talk about the big, abstract, meta issues -- and we should -- we owe it to the human beings involved to observe the human story, up close, with all the ugly details. Stories like this aren't easy or binary, and deserve complex, respectful treatment. We send reporters to Baghdad for in-depth reporting about the war; reporters covering this story would do well to understand this reality up close and personal, unromanticized. From Breslin's piece: Not infrequently, [Max Hardcore] scenes are fraught with pedophilia themes, beginning when he stumbles upon his subjects in playgrounds, where they sit alone, in pigtails, talking baby-talk, and sucking on lollipops. Mostly, the sex scenes end with his latest costar a mess and Hardcore triumphant. Even for the most jaded porn watcher, Little's ouevre is over the top. Watching Little's work is less like watching a porn movie than it is akin to witnessing a vivisection. On the screen, Hardcore bends over the female bodies before him, sometimes with speculum in hand, as if attempting to get at something within her at which he can never quite get, and so to which he is doomed to return, his methods more and more hardcore. In Porn Valley, Little is something of a pariah. The larger, more mainstream-oriented and consumer-friendly adult production companies like Vivid Video and Wicked Pictures pride themselves on turning out adult content that plays by the rules, thereby, they hope, protecting the industry from legal persecution. In contrast, Little and company, other producers believe, put the entire industry at risk by creating content more likely to be targeted in obscenity indictments. (See: The Cambria List.) In 2005, the Bush administration launched its so-called "War on Porn," forming the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a Department of Justice outfit dedicated to pursuing obscenity prosecutions, and the FBI began recruiting for a "porn squad," otherwise known as the Adult Obscenity Squad, focused on "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography. In late 2005, federal agents raided Little's offices in Altadena, California, but it wasn't until early 2007 that his indictment was unsealed. As it turned out, OPTF Director Brent Ward had found getting US Attorneys to pursue obscenity prosecutions wasn't easy. Consequently, US Attorneys who preferred dedicating their resources to crimes other than obscenity in districts more likely to win the administration obscenity convictions were eliminated. Late last year, the OPTF's first trial began in Phoenix, Arizona, pitting the US government against a producer of bukkake videos, but the result was an embarrassment, the pornographer slipping out of the government's hands in the courtroom. When it came to Little, prosecutors were gunning for a win. Finally, three years after the OPTF was formed, the Feds got their man. To The Max (contains explicit language; reversecowgirl blog)...br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=a6cbff773034d1c54f1ae26f9630c0fc" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a6cbff773034d1c54f1ae26f9630c0fc" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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executions,crimes,adults,hustler,torture

Sommes-nous tous devenus mazos ?

Réflexions du Miroir

- 9 hours and 27 minutes ago

p style=text-align: justify;a href=http://www.panda-france.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/sommes-nous-tous-devenus-mazos.jpgspan style=color: #000080;img name=Image1 border=1 align=bottom width=58 src=http://www.panda-france.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/sommes-nous-tous-devenus-mazos.thumbnail.jpg alt=sommes-nous-tous-devenus-mazos.jpg height=128 id=Image1 //span/aJ’ai toujours aimé jouer le rôle d’Enfoiré. Cela fait un bail que les premiers lecteurs me suivent dans ma démarche. Enfoiré, mais jamais a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masochismemasochiste/a, même si les sujets étaient parfois très sérieux./p p style=text-align: justify;Drastique et pragmatique sont les adjectifs que j’aime m’ajouter./p p style=text-align: justify;Je ne jouerai jamais un des rôles de sadique ou de masochiste qui, lors d'une rencontre, verrait le premier répondre par la négative après la demande du second de lui faire mal./p p style=text-align: justify;Les a href=http://vanrinsg.hautetfort.com/Réflexions du Miroir/a renvoient parfois une obligation de changer son fusil d’épaule à son auteur quand il n'est plus compris dans ces objectifs./p p style=text-align: justify;Nous nous apercevons de plus en plus qu’on aime se faire peur. Il y a depuis toujours les médias qui se doivent de prévenir et il y a depuis la dernière décade les blogs et les sites citoyens qui en ajoutent une couche. Les médias ont perdu la confiance des lecteurs, victimes tous deux des scoops et du sensationnalisme. Les citoyens, eux-mêmes, aiment se rassurer sur leurs impressions intimes de mal être en lisant les autres sur Internet. Alors, quand une vrai crise présente son nez, c'est le cauchemar accentué à la puissance n près à se flinguer./p p style=text-align: justify;Les titres des articles n’ont plus assez de mots les plus durs, les plus expressifs pour l’exprimer./p p style=text-align: justify;On n’essaye même pas de comprendre, on accuse, mais on ne cherche pas de solutions ni de palliatifs dans la panique. L’objectivité fait place à la subjectivité. Les gourous sont au pouvoir. Les spécialistes, et ils sont légions, se présentent au chevet des malades. L’audience de mes articles ne m’importe que très peu. C’est du «nbsp;free of chargenbsp;» en ce qui me concerne. Le plaisir d’écrire et de réfléchir, de chercher les raisons aux événements. Je ne cherche pas à avoir raison. Une seule orientation portée par une expérience. Descriptifs, mes analyses ne demandaient pas une prise en charge sans réflexions ou dans la contrainte./p p style=text-align: justify;Notre rôle de citoyen n’est pas nécessairement de suivre la masse dans la sinistrose prémâchée par les médias./p p style=text-align: justify;Mon dernier article, a href=http://vanrinsg.hautetfort.com/archive/2008/10/05/l-amerique-presidence-pragmatique.html«nbsp;Amérique, présidence pragmatiquenbsp;?nbsp;/a» avait un titre qui se terminait par un point d’interrogation. Pourquoi, parce qu’il y a une vieille expression américaine qui dit «nbsp;The right man at the right placenbsp;». La confiance est une question de trouver l’oiseau rare. Et oui, mettre celui-ci à la bonne place remettra tôt ou tard sure un autre chemin./p p style=text-align: justify;J’ai eu l’occasion de jauger, d'apprécier ou de haïrnbsp;les américains en y recherchant le processus qui jusqu’ici apportait des résultats des résultats positifs pour certains et pas toujours pour d’autres. Quand on arrive à l’excès, il faut des correctifs, de la régulation./p p style=text-align: justify;Mon eBook de la Grande Gaufre, c'est une expérience comme une autre. Elle n’intéresse pas et ne se commente pas pourquoi ? Simple, il faut être dans la situation de l’intérieur pour le comprendre. Les autres s’en foutent. Normal./p p style=text-align: justify;La situation mondiale est grave. Je l’ai dit. Elle ronge. Une rage de dents mais sans médecin ou dentiste avec le remède dans les mains. a href=http://blogrtbf.typepad.com/matin_premiere/2008/10/710---une-crise.htmlUne explication qui me parraisait le plus exacte sur la situation/a./p p style=text-align: justify;Mon métier d’informaticien m’a appris que quand un programme ne trouvait pas la bonne filière de la solution, il valait mieux le jeter et recommencer. Cela ne veut pas dire qu’il faille jeter le bébé, l’eau du bain et la bassine qui les contenaient, mais qu’il fallait prendre un temps de repos pour repenser le problème à la base. L’expérience associée à de l’imagination peuvent enrayer le processus de crise./p p style=text-align: justify;Je vais prendre une résolution pour les articles qui vont suivre. Je change de braquet, je me lance dans le plus intimiste en sortant temporairement le mot «nbsp;crisenbsp;» de mon vocabulaire. Pas de panique. Le futur est toujours ce que nous en font aujourd’hui. Les cercles vicieux avec des informations qui se bousculent créent des mécanismes infernaux./p p style=text-align: justify;Ni a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemminglemming/a qui fonce vers le précipice, ni a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnouGnou/a qui s’élance en migration vers la rivière par l’instinct. Un Enfoiré, seulement, et cela ne sera pas nécessairement triste./p p style=text-align: justify;Mon deuxième article a href=http://vanrinsg.hautetfort.com/archive/2005/03/09/juste_un_coup_de_frein.htmlJuste un coup de frein/a est toujours d'actualité./p p style=text-align: justify;Alors, comme on dit, bon vent./p p style=margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;nbsp;/p p style=margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;L'Enfoiré,/p p style=margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;nbsp;/p p style=margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;Citations:/p p style=margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;nbsp;/p ul style=text-align: justify; li p style=margin-bottom: 0cm;span style=font-family: Times New Roman;«nbsp;Même les masochistes font des aveux complets sous les tortures. Par reconnaissance.nbsp;», Stanislaw Jerzy Lec/span/p /li li p style=margin-bottom: 0cm;span style=font-family: Times New Roman;«nbsp;Il existe une prédilection masochiste des Français pour deux exercices dans lesquels ils se révèlent malchanceux : la guerre et le football.nbsp;», Michel Audiard/span/p /li li p style=margin-bottom: 0cm;span style=font-family: Times New Roman;«nbsp;L'Homo sapiens est masochiste : il savoure la douleur sous de nombreuses formes.nbsp;», Charlie Chaplin/span/p /li li pspan style=font-family: Times New Roman;«nbsp;Le masochisme est une perversion absurde qui consiste à se faire du mal à soi-même, alors qu'il y a les autres pour cela.nbsp;», Georges-Armand Massonlt;?xml:namespace prefix = o /gt;/span/p /li /ul p style=text-align: justify;br //p

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Vanguard Cinema Announces '99 Pieces' and 'Quench'

Links for 2008-10-06 [del.icio.us]

Belliraj : tortures au Maroc

Choisissez entre détente et auto-torture

You Need This In Your Life

Comics Should Be Good!

- 15 hours and 30 minutes ago

You just do. There is no question about this. So do not question it. Simply embrace it. It will lift you out of the dreary doldrums of your humdrum life, simplistic rubes! I do not know when I became an ’80s wrestling heel around here, insulting the audience casually, but it happened. It can’t unhappen.

Well, maybe through the miracle power of this concoction. It is that great. So great that I am attempting to make it the biggest link in comic blog history. I mean, it’s like that Machete trailer from Grindhouse with an ape! All other writers should stop trying to top that now. I don’t just mean bloggers, or bloggers who are comic book writers. I mean all writers everywhere. Even non-fiction writers. I mean… seriously… it’s just… this is bigger than my man crush on Sims. Or whatever self aggrandizement I get out of feeling like we’re more or less the same guy.

Whatever. It’s all irrelevant. This is bigger than everything. Who cares about DCU torture porn? There’s a ape assassain comic coming soon! And Sims and some other guys did a trailer for it! In comics! Drop everything! Including your drawers! Well, maybe you should keep those on. Let’s not lose our heads. Or underwear.

I usually throw a youtube link or a pro wrestling reference in a post beyond 20 words or so. I can’t do that and stay with my original idea. But I must vamp this out to an absurd degree, or this can’t be a huge post that’s just a link to this fun thing Sims, Matthew Allen Smith, and Benjamin Birdie did. How can I pad this out anymore? Surely, if I meditate hard enough, Exterminape will break the fourth wall and tell me what to do!

Okay. He did. He said he appreciates the link, but I keep up with the schtick, he’s gonna cap me. And then, to prove he wasn’t messing around, he dropkicked my cat out a window and made him explode. To be fair, the cat deserved it. So, that’ll wrap this up. You should probably click on the link now.

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torture,blog,comic,non fiction,sims

Has DC sunk this low?

Comics Should Be Good!

- 17 hours and 27 minutes ago

“This low” meaning “Is DC now publishing torture porn?” How sad would that be?

Over at Every Day Is Like Wednesday, I came across a description of Nightwing #149: “[I]t is incredibly, spectacularly awful.” Caleb goes far more into it, and I just thought, “I must buy this. I must read it.” And so I bought it. And I read it. Boy howdy, he’s right. He celebrates its awfulness, however, believing that nothing can come “anywhere near the terrible glory” that is Nightwing #149. I can’t be quite so blasé about it, however. This is a bad comic. More than that, it’s a depressing comic. In a DC Universe that has recently been all about cruelty, this stands out. If you didn’t buy it, I thought I’d break it down for you.

Page 1: Nightwing is narrating. He’s breaking through “the safehouse window” and he can “smell them” before he can see them. We see some major Batman villains: Joker, Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, Killer Croc, Penguin, Poison Ivy, and Two-Face. Joker is holding a crowbar with blood on it, the tip of Penguin’s umbrella has blood on it, and Killer Croc has blood dripping from his teeth and claws. Unpleasant, but nothing terribly egregious. Thanks to Nightwing’s narration, we learn that he might be hallucinating some of this because of Scarecrow’s “fear serum.” Okay.

Pages 2-3: These are two big splash pages, with the credits on Page 3. On page 2, our perspective is from behind Dick as he stands above the villains. Each villain is menacing a woman, but we quickly realize it’s the same woman, so this must be a hallucination. Much of what follows is just that - not “real.” However, that doesn’t change the fact that the events are drawn on the page. Anyway, Mr. Freeze has, well, frozen his woman. Behind him stands the Joker with his crowbar, and the woman at his feet has blood streaming down her face. The Penguin clutches his victim against his chest with his pointed umbrella across her throat. Oddly, she has two large round blood splotches on her breasts, where her nipples would be. It’s bizarre. Croc has very clearly eaten his woman. Even though Dick is blocking most of our view of that, we see a stump of a leg. Charming. On page 3, Dick leaps down among them and starts beating on them. This all takes place in what looks like a lake of blood on the floor, by the way.

Page 4: We learn that the woman’s name is Carol. We have no idea who she is, yet (we’ll find out). Croc has Carol’s head in his mouth, and blood is pouring down her face. She chastizes Dick for failing to save her. Croc falls forward into the blood on the floor. Dick leaps backward and then lands on Croc’s head. He takes his two sticks (nunchucks?) and … rams them into Croc’s eyes. Blood spurts out with a swell sound effect: “Sklatch.” The Penguin appears to stab Dick in the back. It’s unclear whether he stabs him or just whacks him with the flat of the umbrella’s point.

Page 5: Our hero kicks Penguin in the face, knocking him against a wall and presumably giving him a concussion (that is, if Oswald were there, which he’s not). Then we see Scarecrow, holding Carol’s limp body as blood coats his shirt. Dick leaps at Scarecrow and tackles him.

Pages 6-8: Dick holds Scarecrow under the level of the blood on the floor, asking him why he looks so scared - “What’s the problem - my hands too tight?!?” He continues, “Fear got your tongue?!? Spit it out - I can’t hear you with all that blood in your mouth!” Behind him, Poison Ivy wraps vines around his neck and pulls him backward. She asks him if he can smell the “beautiful leaves and flowers.” Dick responds, “I like the smell of cut grass better after it’s been mowed.” Uh, what? Ivy makes her vines smash him against the ceiling, telling him to “apologize” to it. Uh, what? As he hangs there, Carol shows up again. This time she tells him what happened to her: “Ivy broke my windpipe … squeezed every last breath from me … and you let her …” Dick breaks free and shoots a rope at Ivy. This somehow electrocutes her. But then Mr. Freeze shows up! Behind him are several frozen people. At least there’s no blood!

Pages 9-10: Underneath the now-frozen blood, Carol lies, blaming Dick for her plight. Dick breaks free of Freeze’s ice and breaks his helmet. He takes Freeze’s gun, shoves it in his mouth, and fires. Not without saying, and I kid you not, “Ever drink a chocolate shake too fast … and get a brain freeze?” Icicles shoot out of Freeze’s eyes and nose. Behind Dick, the Joker says, “Ever talk too much and get a brain fart?” Um, what? I know this is mostly a hallucination of Dick’s, but the shadow that the Joker casts shows him holding the crowbar over his head, while he’s standing with it lowered. Good stuff.

Pages 11-12: So the Joker bashes Dick for a page, evoking Jason’s death both visually and by referencing it himself. Dick, however, grabs hold of the crowbar and punches the Joker out. That leaves Harvey, who compliments him on defeating his “hired help.”

Pages 13-14: Harvey tells Dick that he shot our hero with bullets laced with fear serum, and then he drags out the real Carol, still very much alive. I should point out that they’re still standing in what looks like blood, and it’s up to their waists. Yes, their waists. Meanwhile, lying on the ground, underneath the surface, are several punks that presumably Nightwing saw as the villains. Um, are they dead? If not, they’re going to drown pretty soon. I know they’re bad guys, but damn, Dick - that’s cold. Anyway, we find out that Harvey came to Dick and asked him to keep Carol safe. So now he’s proving that Dick can’t keep her safe. Yes, it makes sense. Dick tries to reason with him, but there’s only one logical solution that Harvey understands - the coin! He flips a coin.

Pages 15-16: Okay, I hope Dick is still imagining things, because the coin Harvey flips grows huge, knocking him through a wall as a bomb goes off. He falls and imagines that his parents are falling with him, while suddenly, Harvey and Carol are on the roof of the building. Okay, a wall collapsed and the building is still standing? And they were in the room where the bomb went off but now they’re on the roof? Hmmm … Carol tries to get through to Harvey, but he tells her, “I need you to die,” and pulls the trigger.

Pages 17-19: As Dick fires a line toward the roof, we see a close-up of Carol’s face. Then we pull back and we see her bleeding from a gut shot. She’s remarkably lucid for just getting shot in the gut, as she asks if Harvey’s just going to stand there and watch her die. You’d think she’d be doubled over moaning in pain, but not Carol! On the next page, she’s lying on the ground in agony, bleeding out (that was a quick transition!) as Harvey leaves, saying he’s “going to walk out slowly” so he doesn’t “slip” on her blood. Classy! Dick reaches Carol, who is apparently back inside the building, and he imagines he sees Barbara lying there, shot through the spine. Then he sees that it’s Carol, blood all over the floor beneath her. Nice! He starts to administer CPR, which means he has to rip open her shirt so we can see her breasts as she dies, and then he slaps her for good measure. All for naught. Sayonara, Carol.

Pages 20-22: There’s a funeral, and then we cut to Harvey at “Bear Mountain State Park.” He’s standing by a limosine, and the man inside is watching coverage of the funeral. We learn that Carol was the district attorney in the “Blackhole investigation,” and this guy hired Harvey to kill her so that the Feds wouldn’t be able to prosecute. Harvey realizes that Dick failed to save her, so he blasts the guy in the limo. And that’s a wrap!

Sweet fancy Moses, this is yucky. I realize that pretty much all of it doesn’t actually take place, but that doesn’t make it any less yucky. And Carol does die “in reality,” so there’s that (and I think we can safely put this in the Women in Refrigerators section as our Dread Lord and Master defines it, as her death does serve a purpose in the context of the larger story, but immediately, it’s simply to get an emotional reaction out of Dick, which is that he’s a lousy hero). Beyond the utter awfulness of the vile violence, however, is the underlying message of DC these days: Heroes can’t do anything to help anyone. Until recently, this was a relatively minor subset of superhero comics. Now, it’s basically the way things are, mostly at DC, but it’s also creeping into Marvel as well. Dick fails in pretty much every way in this comic. He doesn’t overcome Scarecrow’s fear serum, he tries and almost succeeds in “killing” “Scarecrow” (and would have if Ivy hadn’t stopped him), he leaves unconscious thugs to drown, and he can’t stop Harvey from killing Carol. It’s not the end of the story, so I’m sure in Nightwing #150 he’ll do something to prove he’s a hero, but the fact is that in this issue, he’s an utter failure. Not only is he an utter failure, there’s nothing to even hint at any redemption. There’s absolutely no reason for this issue to exist except as “torture porn,” meaning that it allows the creators to indulge in horrific violence for violence’s sake, and they can’t even use the excuse that it’s all in Dick’s head, because the character he’s supposed to saved gets gut-shot and bleeds to death.

Peter Tomasi, who wrote this, and Don Kramer, who drew it, should be ashamed of themselves. Tomasi has written some decent stuff in the past, but this might negate everything he’s ever done. This is poorly-written (remember Dick’s comment about “cut grass”?), ugly, and pointless. As Caleb points out, it might have been a meditation on Harvey’s psychosis (he wants Dick to protect Carol, and then makes sure he can’t), but it’s swamped, quite literally, by the blood. You might think I’m being overly squeamish. Well, I read the novels of Michael Slade and love them, so I don’t think that’s it. It’s that this is a mainstream DC superhero comic, and therefore, as Greg Hatcher pointed out recently, it’s probably going to be a bit immature. DC has been trying very hard to make their comics “mature,” but what that means to them is killing people in gruesome ways. I don’t want to go all “Won’t someone think of the children?” here, but the fact that this isn’t labeled as a “mature readers” book and that any kid can buy it depresses me. DC should shit or get off the pot. Make their superheroes “mature” books or stop printing crap like this.

I know I’m pissing in the wind with that, so I’ll do the only thing I can: Beg you to avoid buying this book or any like it. Not only is this horrifying in all the wrong ways, it’s dull, dumb, and ugly. It’s everything we should think of when we think of offensively bad comic books. It’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with so much of DC’s output these days. It’s not even fun to eviscerate this thing. It’s just sad.

(I’d love to show you some scans of the pages, but that, I think, would be as bad as drawing it in the first place. I hope you can live with my descriptions of what happens. Seeing it might depress you even further.)

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literally,psychosis,investigations,punches,howdy

Amnesty International - The Stuff of Life

Head Kenzan: Massage Away Stress, Torture Prisoners With One Handy Device [Massage]

My Five Months With Google Chrome

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

- 1 days and 12 hours ago

Om Malik wrote an interesting post about Google Chrome one month after the public launch. While I was reading Om’s post, I realized that I wrote a post for the Google Chrome release that I never published. I’ll include it here, and then let’s meet at the bottom and compare notes.

Like many Google engineers, I’ve been running Google Chrome for several months. When I sat down with a blank piece of paper to write down why you should try Google Chrome, I ended up with several reasons, including speed, security, stability, and openness. I’ll run through them for you.

Speed. Google Chrome is wicked fast, especially if you use AJAX/JavaScript-heavy web applications such as Gmail. And it’s not just “benchmark fast,” it’s end-to-end fast. Google Chrome puts special emphasis on never making the user wait. Opening a tab is essentially instantaneous, and all the little pauses that would normally interrupt your workflow just don’t happen. Of course, sometimes a remote web server is slow to return data–there’s nothing that a web browser can do about that–but for everything else, the browser speeds along like lightning.

When Gmail came out, it took me months to switch over. Before Gmail, I used mutt and I had all kinds of crazy customizations and wild procmail rules, so it took quite a while for Gmail to convince me to switch. In contrast, it took less than a week for me to switch to Google Chrome. It’s so scary fast that I felt like I was taking smart pills because of all the extra work and email I could blast through.

Security. As the head of Google’s webspam team, I prowl around some pretty hairy places on the internet. Almost every day I encounter hacked pages, malware, porn, and generally scuzzy pages. The security model in Google Chrome is much stronger than most other browsers I’ve used. I’ve surfed through hundreds of seedy back alleys of the Internet over the last several months, and Google Chrome has safely kept me from being infected or affected by the junky web pages I encounter.

Stability. I loved my previous browser (and still do!), but I got used to killing my browser and restarting it daily to prevent memory leaks from hobbling my machine. I’ve run Google Chrome for weeks at a time with bunches of open tabs and it hasn’t crashed on me or bloated up my computer’s memory. I also love that Google has a “ChromeBot” which takes each new browser build and throws (put your pinky finger to your lips) one million webpages at the build as a torture test. That testing virtually guarantees that everyday web pages shouldn’t crash your browser. Google Chrome has been rock solid for me.

Openness. You aren’t locked in to using Google’s search; you can choose to use any major search engine in Google Chrome. Plus, as you click around the web, you don’t send surfing information to Google. Google Chrome is open-source under a BSD license, so you can check that for yourself. The cool bits of Google Chrome, including V8 (a from-the-ground-up JavaScript virtual machine), are open for anyone to take and use.

The comic book. Still not convinced? If you’re a geek, read the 40-page comic book about Google Chrome. It’s genuinely educational about the design choices that Google made. It turns out that a comic is one of the best ways to introduce a large piece of new software:

Ben Goodger talks about the Omnibox

You’ve all heard the acronym “RTFM,” right? It stands for Read The *cough* Fine Manual. The next time someone asks whether Google Chrome uses WebKit or something else, I can say RTFC–Read The Fine Comic.

Okay, how well does that post hold up after a month?

On speed, I think Chrome really holds up well. Om’s comments are filled with people who got hooked on the speedy and nice Google Chrome browser experience. A couple people who didn’t like it only tried it for a day; I really think you need to give Chrome a few days (maybe a week) to really notice the end-to-end difference.

On security, I was impressed that so few security holes were found, and most of them required the user to take some additional action or involved social engineering. I have seen very few (no?) attacks like “surf to a random page and your browser gets pwned.” That’s really nice to see; I’m sure the Chrome team was anxious to see what would happen when the outside world tried to attack Chrome. Chrome has been quite robust for a web browser that was only recently released into beta. I continue to surf to really dangerous places with no resulting hijacks or malware.

How about stability? I always thought this would be the weakest point of the Chrome launch, and not because of web pages that would crash Chrome, but because it’s hard to test on a wide variety of real-world hardware when you’re trying to keep a product secret before releasing it. And again, I was surprised that so few things broke. The fact that the Chrome team has released four updates to Chrome in four weeks tells me two things: 1) the worst bugs are going to get knocked down pretty quickly and 2) the Chrome team is very serious about iterating to improve the browser.

Openness is an interesting one. I think the EULA issue caused a short-term goodwill hit. Google corrected the terms in about a day, but it still provided material for the people who dislike the fundamental notion of the Chrome browser. I have to admit that I was surprised that people objected to the “Suggest” feature when you’re typing into the address bar, but it’s good that Google reacted quickly on that one as well. I had a conversation with Danny Sullivan where he urged Google employees to try to look at Google as if they were outside the company and didn’t work for Google. It’s excellent advice and definitely provides a helpful perspective. Ultimately, I think that the open-source availability of Google Chrome’s code should reassure most people and win over fans with time.

And the comic book? I still think it’s a cool way to explain a lot of complex design decisions.

I’ve been watching the Chrome team work, and my hunch is that they’re going to earn the respect and loyalty of a lot of surfers over time. Their ability to execute reminds me of how the Google Reader team won me over a couple years ago. If you’re running Windows and haven’t taken it for a spin, if you try Chrome for 5-6 days, I think you’ll like it too.

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