What to do about rude porn sites...?

[Sailor Saturn]

Tonight, for no apparent reason, about five porn sites added themselves to the "Favorites" folder in IE on my computer, my dad's computer, and my mom's computer. On my computer and my dad's computer, they also changed our home pages from Neopets(mine) and Astros(his) to sexslam. They didn't change the home page on my mom's computer. When I was deleting them from Favorites on my computer, I accidentally left clicked one instead of right clicked and thus opened the page. Almost imediately about 2-3 dozen pop ups came up and as I closed one, two more would take their place. About a third of these pop ups bookmarked themselves into the Favorites folder, effectively trippling my "favorites" list. I had, before the accidental left click changed my home page back to Neopets. One of these 20 million pop ups(pissflaps) made itself my new home page. I have now managed to close all the pop ups, delete all the porn sites that got bookmarked, and switched my home page back to neopets. To make it worse, almost all of these sites were child/earlyteens porn.

I know the child/earlyteens porn is illegal. Is the way these sites invaded our computers illegal? If so, where can I report these sites where something will actually be done about it?

[Gruntboy]

C Elegans sig has links to the kinds of sites you are looking for.

[C Elegans]

Gruntie is right, check my sig against child pornography. They have a links section where you can find links to report the stuff, but I post a link here just to make it quicker, it's of importance to report as swift as possible.
[url="http://www.iwf.org.uk/hotline/index.htm"]http://www.iwf.org.uk/hotline/index.htm[/url]

[Aegis]

That sort of thing on the next is terrible, and it pisses me off everytime some stupid little thing like that happens... I wish there was an effective blocker to keep those things out...

[Garcia]

Originally posted by Aegis:
<STRONG>That sort of thing on the next is terrible, and it pisses me off everytime some stupid little thing like that happens... I wish there was an effective blocker to keep those things out...</STRONG>

There is.....let me just see if I can find it.

[C Elegans]

Adult porn pop up bombardment is something I think many people would like to be able to block.

But child porn is illegal, and is inself a documentation of a horrible crime committed to a defenseless child. Thus, I would not want people to block out child porn, catch the URL:s and report it to the many Internet contact points against child porn.

[fable]

@SS, leaving aside the issue of child porn (and the @#$!?! who promote these things, both online and off), unless you have a good firewall, any site you visit can potentially make devastating changes to your computer. They can add items to your Favorites folders, and download, install and run software on your CPU. There's no law in place against such a thing, provided it doesn't trash your computer, so it can and does occur.

(The most irritating common example of this is the Comet Cursor program, which many home-based websites employ because it's "cute" and changes your cursor into a host of interesting shapes. Unfortunately, the program does this automatically, without asking. It then runs a tracer program to watch where you go on the Web, relaying all that information regularly back to the Comet folks for sale as demographics material to subscribers. Disgusting.)

It sounds like someone in your household accidentally followed a link to one such site. You may find that simply removing the offending links doesn't work, and they mysteriously appear again; in which case, I suspect a resident program that "wakes up" to restore the defaults that the download has set in place. I would strongly urge you to consider acquiring the freeware program AdAware at [url="http://www.lavasoftusa.com/index.html"]www.lavasoftusa.com/index.html,[/url] which is regularly updated, and checks to see if your CPU has been "infected" by monitoring programs. A good virus program is a must--something like Norton, for instance.

You may also want to check the security levels in Explorer or Netscape, or whatever you're running to access the net. Even without a firewall, those programs should catch and stop attempts to "take control" of your computer.

Hope this helps.

[ 10-01-2001: Message edited by: fable ]

[Mr Sleep]

If one is concerned about anonymity then you can use [url="http://www.anonymiser.de/"]anonymiser[/url] to stop people tracking your browsing

BTW check out tucows as well they have a whole myriad of protection programs

[Sailor Saturn]

Thanks for the links, everyone. I'll check'em all out after class because I don't have time to check'em out right now.

[Shadow Sandrock]

Auuugh! I don't know what the heck got into my computer's mind to every so often throw up beastiality links... Yuck!

[Sailor Saturn]

An "interesting" little note: One of the sites had a link to a deal to download that will clean your hard drive "removing all evidence of having ever gone" to such sites, as well as chat logs, etc.

[Yshania]

Posted by C E -

Thus, I would not want people to block out child porn, catch the URL:s and report it to the many Internet contact points against child porn.

Good point

[Shadow Sandrock]

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn:
<STRONG>An "interesting" little note: One of the sites had a link to a deal to download that will clean your hard drive "removing all evidence of having ever gone" to such sites, as well as chat logs, etc. </STRONG>

By cleaning out the History, the Cookies, and the Temporary Internet files, most of the evidence should have disappeared... also try removing entirely any evidence of them from the favorites section.

[ThorinOakensfield]

So people have been busy looking at porn sites. There's no way they can do that unless you visit their sites.

[Sailor Saturn]

Originally posted by Shadow Sandrock:
<STRONG>By cleaning out the History, the Cookies, and the Temporary Internet files, most of the evidence should have disappeared... also try removing entirely any evidence of them from the favorites section.</STRONG>

I'm not trying to remove any evidence. I know how to do all that. What that thing is for is to remove the "shadows" of the files/information so that no one can prove you've looked at that stuff. When you delete all that stuff you're talking about, a skilled programmer/hacker/something can still piece together the information from 'shadows' that are left on the disk. I'm not trying to get rid of any of that stuff, so it doesn't really matter.

[fable]

Originally posted by ThorinOakensfield:
<STRONG>So people have been busy looking at porn sites. There's no way they can do that unless you visit their sites. </STRONG>

Not so, O Self-Proclaimed God Thorin. Some sites are sneaky. They'll supposedly offer a link to another site (of whatever nature) when in fact the link downloads and runs software on your machine. This is really, really disgusting, IMO, but it does occassionally happen, and there is no legal recourse.

[ThorinOakensfield]

Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>Not so, O Self-Proclaimed God Thorin. Some sites are sneaky. They'll supposedly offer a link to another site (of whatever nature) when in fact the link downloads and runs software on your machine. This is really, really disgusting, IMO, but it does occassionally happen, and there is no legal recourse.</STRONG>

Self proclaimed!!! Thou has insulted me! Unleash the tanks of fury+2.

Yeah i have been emailed by these porn sites before. Once or something. But i'm not sure. Well i don't what the adults do, but i haven't been to a site, where there is a porn site that pop-ups.

[Shadow Sandrock]

Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>Not so, O Self-Proclaimed God Thorin. Some sites are sneaky. They'll supposedly offer a link to another site (of whatever nature) when in fact the link downloads and runs software on your machine. This is really, really disgusting, IMO, but it does occassionally happen, and there is no legal recourse.</STRONG>

The Beastiality was from a link I clicked called "Gundam Wing pics"... watch out for a site called "gundam wing pics" in that punctuation. >_<

[Sailor Saturn]

Originally posted by ThorinOakensfield:
<STRONG>Yeah i have been emailed by these porn sites before. Once or something. But i'm not sure. Well i don't what the adults do, but i haven't been to a site, where there is a porn site that pop-ups.</STRONG>

Four of my email addresses have been spammed with porn, including my yahoo, startrekmail, and both of my excite mail addresses.

Sometimes, when I'm searching for something using a search engine, I'll click a site that says it is one thing and it turns out to be a porn site. Those same sites usually have 20 million pop ups that come up as soon as you try to leave their site. Each time you close one of the pop ups, it triggers 2-3 more pop ups, often resulting in multiples of the same pop up. If you're patient enough, you can close them one by one by exiting each individual window. That's what I did on my computer and it took about 20-30 minutes to get rid of them all. The other method, what I used to close all the pop ups on my parents computers, is to alt+F4 repeatedly until you get the window asking if you want to shut down/restart. When you get that window, you know you've closed all of the pop ups and no more are going to pop up. Because the websites had set themselves as home page, it was impossible to open IE without getting pop ups, at first. I had to disconnect from the net and tell IE to work offline to prevent pop ups.

[fable]

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn:
<STRONG>Sometimes, when I'm searching for something using a search engine, I'll click a site that says it is one thing and it turns out to be a porn site. Those same sites usually have 20 million pop ups that come up as soon as you try to leave their site. Each time you close one of the pop ups, it triggers 2-3 more pop ups, often resulting in multiples of the same pop up. If you're patient enough, you can close them one by one by exiting each individual window. That's what I did on my computer and it took about 20-30 minutes to get rid of them all. The other method, what I used to close all the pop ups on my parents computers, is to alt+F4 repeatedly until you get the window asking if you want to shut down/restart. When you get that window, you know you've closed all of the pop ups and no more are going to pop up. Because the websites had set themselves as home page, it was impossible to open IE without getting pop ups, at first. I had to disconnect from the net and tell IE to work offline to prevent pop ups.</STRONG>

Check out Webwasher, a freeware program at [url="http://www.webwasher.com"]www.webwasher.com[/url] I've found it to be excellent at sensing pop-ups, and preventing them from ever occuring. It also watches for (and eliminates) cookies, scripts (those insidious downloads!), etc. Damn fine program that runs in the background and makes life a lot easier.