All Internet Roads Lead to Porn

So there I was on the Internet, doing a little research on an article I was writing, and after finishing and having nothing else to do found myself on a celebrity fetish Web site looking at Lady GaGa in a skin tight latex dress on her way to a night club. This was inevitable. I never have any plans to look at erotic photos or videos when I turn my computer on, but boredom always sends me that way.

It is when I have done everything I had set out to do that day that I wind up on Google Images, and just for the hell of it type in something like LADY WET T-SHIRT. Among the pictures I see Miley Cyrus with her clothes on in a shower (mildly interesting based only on her celebrity status) an advertisement for the island of Jamaica with a woman in a wet red T-hirt (very appealing) to a picture of Jennifer Aniston standing in a water fall in a soaked dress (both appealing and interesting) along with many other pictures that seem to have nothing to do with what I was looking for.

I have tried using these key words before and have seen the pictures that Google found. Each time while some images are gone and some have dropped a page or two back, one or two new ones show up. I see a girl who looks stunning posing in a soaked shirt in a shower and click the link ending up on a Web site that shows clips from B movies where actresses get their clothing wet and see-through.

The only movie I recognize is a forgettable Ashton Kutcher comedy called My Boss's Daughter, where Carmen Electra is in a swimming pool in a wet football jersey. Most of the clips are from Bollywood movies where in the past few years they have seemed to become obsessed with including scenes where popular actresses dance around in water fountains fully clothed. In the case of Lady Gaga the key words I had typed into Google was CELEBRITY LATEX, and I found Lindsay Lohan and Posh Spice in latex leggings both on the way to the market, the lead singer from the Pussycat Dolls on a red carpet in a tight dark grey latex dress, Paris Hilton in a short tight black latex dress with a police cap, and the picture of Lady GaGa which was new to me and lead me to the other Web site.

It is the same story with anyone else who spend too much time on the Internet. Sure, there is a lot to do. Chat rooms and message boards to have conversations on, game sites, shopping, research, you name it. But inevitably there comes a time when you finished everything, no one is currently at the usual chat rooms or if they are they have brought up a topic you are not interested in, you cant think of anything you want to look up on YouTube or any product you want to search for on eBay, etc.

Well, maybe I should look at pictures of pretty girls. If there is a particular celebrity I am interested in then I will find her fan site and see what is available. More usually though all I can think of is a particular outfit I would like to see someone wearing. I type in something like CATSUIT and look through the images until I see something I like. This inevitably leads to a soft porn Web site. I wasn't looking for one, but I just happened to like one of the girls who's image popped up and it turned out to be a link to a porn site. I try to avoid the porn sites. Not out of any moral condemnation but because they always seemed to end up downloading malware designed to either change your home page to their site or cause a cascade of pop-up ads that even the best pop-up blockers are unable to stop. Some even had the gall to prevent me from navigating away without agreeing to subscribe to their site first. "Are you sure you want to leave this site?" the pop-up would ask.

No matter what I answered it simply would neither allow me to leave or allow me to X the web browser off. I had the choice of either giving them my credit card number so I may enter the site, or reboot the computer. Other sites manipulated the web browser so that the X disappeared off the top of the screen, or had a nasty redirect that kept bringing you back to their Web site every time you attempted to navigate away with the back button. Sometimes it was the pop-up ads on free sites that caused the trouble. One nasty pop-up ad was designed to redirect me to a completely different hard core porn site I did not agree to go to and then force me to reboot my computer to get away from it.

Okay, maybe I deserved it, looking for pictures of pretty girls on the computer. But some aggressive porn sites capture web surfers who were not even looking for porn. Lets say you see a picture of Barney, that lovable and annoying dinosaur from children's television, and looking to download the picture for your kids click the image. Only it brings yo to a page that immediately redirects you to a porn site. Apparently this has happened with not just Barney but several different images. Some porn sites are so desperate for traffic that they began setting up redirect pages consisting of a single image and the name of the image printed a few dozen times beneath so that Google Images would find it. These porn sites would find out what were the top 100 searched images and then use them, without the permission of their copyright holders, to redirect traffic to their sites. These redirect pages were also full of paragraphs choked with key words which worked the same way as the pictures did.

One story had a kid doing a term paper typing in GEORGE WASHINGTON WOODEN TEETH and ending up on a hardcore porn site. He was not careful enough to notice that the web page Google had found had a paragraph of random words and just clicked the link without looking. But the nastiest way that porn sites have used to capture unwary web surfers is by buying another sites domain name. In some cases these were sites that went out of business and left their domain name up for grabs. But most of the time these were active Web sites who's owners simply forgot to pay that years fee for maintaining the domain name on time and had it bought out from under them by a broker who then sold the domain to a porn site. People clicking on the old site are unwittingly redirected to a porn site. One of the victims of this was Thor Equities who's Web site thefutureofconeyisland.com suddenly redirected visitors to a French site called sexeporno1.com.

Another way of trapping traffic was through file sharing peer-to-peer services like Napster, Kazaa, and Morpheus. You thought you were downloading that Beatles song, but when you went to play it your media player shut off and your web browser came on directing you to a porn site. they also figured out how to do this with videos. One of the video files had a closeup of Daisy Duke style shorts on a person unknown being unzipped. Attempt to play the video and you ended up on a porn site. Somewhere on the Internet was a computer that was capable of lying about the file it had. You ask for a Mr. Rogers song and it was able to rename it's malicious file Mr. Rogers in an attempt to trick you into downloading it. Type in gibberish and it said it had that too. In other words if you were to ask your peer-to-peer service to find jfdshdfhrdshjersj then the porn computer would say it had that file. Some of them would add "Rare Recording", "Full Version" or "Unreleased Single" to the file name.

It all sounds like desperation. A porn site unable to find traffic tricks millions of unsuspecting web surfers in hopes that a few hundred will be perverts, some who are so thrilled with the porn they found that they will forget they were looking for the Beatles, Barney or George Washington and instead spend their money on downloading smut. Well, actually that is not really the full story. Many porn sites, especially the free ones, make money through advertisers. Some are advertisements for sex toys and some for other porn sites. The problem though is that these advertisers only know that a unique IP has seen their ad. They assume the person seeing it is interested in sexual activities, not realizing that many of them could just as easily be a furious Sunday school teacher who was hijacked onto the one Web site they never wanted to log onto. By the way, it is not just porn sites that trick people onto their web pages. Quite a few other Web sites do the same but do not get the notoriety that the porn sites do. And it should also be pointed out that most porn sites are businesses that would prefer not antagonizing the customers who they want to return again and again. These porn sites act responsibly. The problem is that persons most likely to set up a trap site are more likely to chose Porn as the sites subject. Quite often they use copyrighted porn from other sites without their permission. Other times these sites are overseas and take advantage of poor women, the mentally impaired and sometimes even children. But like I said, these are just the bad apple sites. The majority of porn sites rely on return business from happy satisfied customers.

As much as I never really have any intention of looking for porn, it has a habit of turning up on my computer more often then I care to admit. I probably should be using my time on the Internet more constructively. There is a whole world of information out there at my fingertips. The entire text for "War and Peace" can be found on the Internet, a book I never read. But at the same time I do have hormones which usually lead to the curious peek and inevitably an hour or two wasted staring at pictures of sexy women. But for those others who do have better self control and a strong moral conscience, take my advice. LOOK OUT! One way or another you will end up on a porn site whether you intended to go there or not.