Protect Yourself (And Your Porn) On The Interwebs

Savvy Fleshbot readers already know how to keep their porn boxes personal computers free from unwanted viruses, spyware, and the like. However, two recent stories highlight the dangers of carefree internet surfing, and the legal trouble that can await users whose machines are unwittingly infected. A teacher in Connecticut is facing 40 years in prison for showing porn on her classroom computer, but her defense was that popup adware is the real culprit and several experts have pointed out that her explanation makes a lot more sense than the prosecution's. A 16-year-old boy in Arizona was nearly forced to register as a sex offender after a similar case. In both examples, the real truth may be hard to sort out, but it does raise several important issues for the porn and the internet: that the law is often way behind technology, that you should really pay attention to what's on your computer, and that unscrupulous hackers and spam peddlers are always ruining the fun for everybody else. It's the stories like these that give good porn a bad name.

· "Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware" (Boing Boing)
· "Prison Time For Viewing Porn?" (abcnews.go.com)
· "Fighting child porn vs. ruining innocent lives" (networkworld.com, via Slashdot)
· "Spyware Showing Unrequested Sexually-Explicit Images" (benedelman.org)

Previously: Popups, Viruses, and Links