Kids complicate computers. As infants they can decide your mouse is their best friend, then lug it around for a few days while toddlers have been known to insist that a keyboard needs a few extra sultana-shaped buttons.
Eventually, kids start to use computers properly and for a while all seems well: there's not much a four year old can stumble across with a Bob The Builder CD-ROM playing in front of them.
Before long, however, kids also start to go online and learn that a couple of mouse clicks takes them well beyond The Wiggles. It's about now that junior's exploits become a source of parental worry, as surfing the wide oceans of the internet can lead to encounters with content that adults feel is inappropriate for children. Not all of that content is pornography. Some parents will not want their kids to encounter descriptions of drug and alcohol use, content depicting gambling, strong language or even certain ethical or political statements. Most oppose hate speech like racism, or wildly extremist political or religious views.
Pornography is, however, the biggest threat as some participants in the 'adult entertainment' pornography industry have created elaborate systems offering payment to remunerate those who can send traffic their way. Ironically, analysts believe that the porn industry's ability to understand how myriad referrals created web traffic, and then pay fractions of a cent for each referral, is more sophisticated than techniques used by many 'mainstream' industries.
For parents, this is a nightmare as it creates a plethora of means by which inappropriate material can reach your computer.
Where does it come from?
Simon Johnson, author of Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet, a book due in October (McGraw Hill, $34.95), says that pop-up advertisements are the most common threat. Pop-ups infest many sites, sometimes without publishers of legitimate material knowing about or authorising them. Pop-ups typically advertise something of interest to readers of a site but then lead them towards altogether different sorts of content. Some pop-ups lead to pornography that can quickly be recognised and shut down. Others direct unwitting web surfers to sites that can cause your computer to automatically download and install malicious programs. Some such programs do little more than relay information about your PC to a third party, and the worst examples can usurp your PC to store and distribute pornography or hijack your mail client to distribute spam or harvest email addresses. When the latter happens, the near-inevitable result is a deluge of smutty spam, a favorite 'marketing' tool that delivers extremely strong language and links to very graphic images into your inbox at any time of day or night at very low cost to pornographers.
Search engines are another worry. Some web publishers go to extraordinary lengths to fool search engines so that an innocent search for 'Britney Spears' produces links to sites that Ms. Spears almost certainly would not endorse, even in her current 'adventurous' phase.
Search engines can also bring porn to your PC through accidental means, as most struggle to tell the difference between a website offering a view of 'breasts' and a site offering information on 'breast cancer.' A search for the latter could therefore surprise you and your kids.
Peer-to-peer file sharing applications can also bring porn to your PC, Johnson says. 'When kids go out and search for music, the names of the files do not often reflect the actual content,' he says, as unscrupulous people give pornographic content the name of a popular song for their own twisted reasons. P2P software can also be used to trade inappropriate content, a practice where the truly dreadful can be passed off as 'just a song I swapped.'
Newsgroups offer a different route for porn to reach your PC, as many are dedicated to the distribution, sharing and discussion of extraordinary topics and pictures to illustrate them.
Even bad typing can bring porn to your computer. 'Typosquatters' buy domain names very similar to popular sites, in order to make money from the inevitable typing mistakes people make from time to time. www.alo.com is a prime example of typosquatting, and captures traffic from would-be AOL.com visitors and offers them links to myriad sites including dating services and chat rooms. The latter are another source of porn, according to anti-virus vendor McAfee's Alan Bell.
'We know of chat bots that send messages to anyone in a chat room saying "Come look at my site",' he says. The site in question is often pornographic, and the bot's sole purpose has been to earn money for its perpetrator by driving traffic to a site that pays them for doing so.