Two years ago, a sex site in Pompano Beach used heat-sensitive digital cameras so that they would automatically follow the models as they moved around the small studios.

Wherever you find the cutting edge, it seems, porn operators are there.

``We're always the first,'' boasts Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine. ``We're the wild wild West, or the weird, weird West.''

Porn kings were the first to realize the value of video tapes because it meant patrons no longer had to go to sleazy porn theaters. They also saw quickly how the Internet could make porn even more private.

They move fast because they tend to be aggressive and unfettered by large bureaucracies. ``Our stuff is really low-cost,'' Goldstein says. ``No $16 million on a movie. You put someone in a motel room and shoot. Porno is quick on its feet, no moss under its rear end, and it's free of hangups.''

Because of the need for good graphics, porn sites rushed to technologies like Java and Flash media. They were among the first to do webcasts and interactive streaming. Two years ago, a sex site in Pompano Beach used heat-sensitive digital cameras so that they would automatically follow the models as they moved around the small studios.

Early on, sex operators learned the importance of embedding key words in their sites to get the most hits from search engines. Many include the name of actress Pamela Anderson Lee, a queen with surfers, even if their sites have nothing about her.

They were also early and aggressive purchasers of domain names. Whitehouse.com is a porn site. So are many that are close approximations of popular sites.

One particularly annoying ploy is the use of pop-up windows. When a surfer tries to leave one site, another browser window pops up. If he closes that, he gets another window and then on through a half-dozen more. A surfer may have to close up to 20 windows or shut down his computer to escape such a porn maze.

Some porn techniques get even worse. An Australian porn operator hired a Portuguese hacker to ``pagejack'' millions of surfers and force them to his sex site.

Other sites have offered free hardcore if viewers download special software. The software reprograms their modems, which then automatically dial servers in Africa or the South Pacific. Viewers are astounded when they get hit with $7 a minute long-distance charges.

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South Florida's Internet Porn: porn operators on cutting edge