Public Enemy - Sexually Explicit Material

                                                                                         

Sexually explicit material is rampant on the Internet. Type in any innocuous term in a search engine and you can stumble across any number of sexually explicit web sites. Children could be doing research for school or trying to get to their favorite harmless web site and easily stumble across one of these sites.

According to a survey done by the National Academies, one in four children reported at least one unwanted exposure to sexually explicit pictures on the Internet during the past year, and one out of five reported that they had received a sexual solicitation.

It may appear that sexually explicit web sites are the majority, however, that is not true. Actually, about 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study. It is not necessarily the amount of sites that is the problem, but rather the aggressive nature of these sites. Pornography is a highly competitive industry and requires harsh marketing tactics in order to survive. It is these tactics that make it seem like porn is everywhere. Listed below are some of these tactics:

•Use of stealth sites - registering domain names that are intentionally misleading of which there are two types:

1. Registering a name that sounds like a popular web site, yet misspelled. This is known as Typo-squatting. For instance, yahhoo.com which led directly to a porn site instead of the popular and legitimate web portal yahoo.com.

2. Registering the same name, yet a different top-level domain extension (.org instead of the more popular .com). Two popular examples of this were the whitehouse.com and nasa.com porn sites (since shut-down). These were very similar to their legitimate counterparts whitehouse.gov and nasa.gov both of which are used heavily for educational purposes by children.

•Hidden Keywords - burying unrelated keywords in the content of the web site in hopes of ranking well with the search engines. These keywords are behind the scenes and only viewable by looking at the source code. They will use any combination of popular search terms. You name it, they use it.

•Home page hi-jacking - There are two forms of this technique: the one that is easier to fix is a site that uses an IE vulnerability to automatically set your homepage to theirs. The other one, which is much more difficult to fix, installs a program on your computer which contains the hijacking program. Once it gets onto your system, the hijacker program continually changes (or forces) your homepage back to theirs.

About the author:
You can get "How to Keep Your Child Safe on the Internet", a free 5-part mini-course, here: A Child Safe Internet

Download my free ebook detailing the 4 top dangers your children face while online: http://www.childsafesolutions.com/pdf/special_report.pdf

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