Back in the days I used to help (for free, I was ~13 and nobody asked) moderating a big free-hosting Italian service.
It had a pretty smart business model: hosting was free, but any ads the webmaster wanted to show had to come from the hosting provider and the ad revenue would be shared between the webmaster and the hosting provider.
One of the terms of service was no porn. As you can imagine one of the webmasters made this very successful website, with ads, showing pictures of women and a lot of people thought it was indeed porn.
When the hosting provider closed his account the webmaster brought in lawyers to dispute his ban, and just like that we discovered that in Italy the rule is (ish) that there needs to be penetration to qualify, so the ban had to be reverted.
American culture is very prudish, courtesy of its Puritanical roots which even today cause us to label a woman sucking off an enormous penis (like in "Deep ASCII", referenced in article) as so-called "pornography".
Then what is the point, that Americans aren't really prudish at all and that other people are silly for saying that certain things aren't porn? If it's sarcasm I don't really get the point it's trying to portray
> but blowing up people on TV shows, with blood and body parts going everywhere is perfectly alright.
Don't worry, it is becoming "not alright" already. Completely sanitized movies where people are being thrown like a ragdoll, land on asphalt face down and then walk it off like they were slapped by a baby.
The sanitization is for commercial considerations. Getting a PG13 rating maximizes number of box office ticket buyers, so no blood after stabbings, no gore, and a maximum of one swear word.
Different cultures each have their own standards for what is and is not considered offensive, and each culture thinks that its standards are correct. That isn't hypocrisy, it's just how this whole topic works. There are no two human cultures in history which have entirely agreed on what is and isn't offensive, so why do people feel the need to pick on Americans specifically? It strikes me as extremely narrow-minded.
Because Americans love to push their standards on the rest of the world, specially American companies with high control of Internet contents.
Then again, the current geopolitic clima has proven the time we are supposed to be all friends across the technology field, is coming to an end, and every nation is better off putting effort in ramping up with own siloed technology with less dependency in foreign nations.
Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.
I would say that if there's no depiction of a sexual act, or any gestures or body poses suggesting an invitation to a sexual act, it's not pornography. While I can't necessarily pinpoint where the threshold lies, without certain ingredients like these, it's far from it.
But about a third of HN has wanked to John McCarthy's metacircular implementation of Lisp in Lisp, so that is porn.
And, look, he basically even admitted it in History of Lisp, in a paragraph directly referencing the implementation of the above interpreter:
"The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form
of the language, and some of the decisions made rather lightheartedly for the
“Recursive functions ...” paper later proved unfortunate. These included
the COND notation for conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary
depth of parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty
list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging pornographic
programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused
difficulties in all subsequent implementations."
It was pornographic programming, as admitted by the author, and hackers wank to it in a circle to this day. Open and shut case, pretty much.
Back in the day, I've actually seen ASCII images and animations that would qualify as porn cartoons, so I don't have to survey the presently referenced materials in detail. The majority that are just naked women in a standing pose showing bush and boobs are not porn.
Being naked isn't porn.
Otherwise we would ask, "where were you porn" rather than "where were you born".
Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?