Protect Yourself with a Porn FilterWritten by Nick Smith
The harmful affects of pornography use and addiction are well documented by science. As with most things in life, prevention is most effective way to avoid ever having a problem with pornography. The internet is a wonderful place to access information, read updated news, and connect with people from all over globe. Unfortunately, pornography on internet is everywhere, and it isn't always easy to avoid. Even people taking responsible measures to keep porn off of their computer screens can stumble across it sometimes. The tips found in this article will help you protect yourself and your family online from inappropriate pictures and text. Take measures to filter spam. Spammers can make money if only one person of thousands of people they send sexually explicit emails to clicks on their ad and pays for their service. Do everything you can to keep those emails from ever reaching your inbox. If you have allowed your children to have their own email accounts, filtering spam is best way to ensure inappropriate images never become accessible to them through email. A quick list of things you can do to eliminate spam includes: Only give your email address out to people you know and trust. Do not put your personal email address down for every mailing list or website that asks for it. Many free email services exist now - set up a free account with one of them and use that to sign up for mailing lists. Never click on any links in spam and if at all possible, avoid ever opening email. Both of these actions confirms to spammers that you actively use your email account and you will likely start to receive more spam. Purchase and use a spam filter. Many come packaged with a porn filter as well as other features that will help keep inappropriate content off of your computer screen. Be careful what you download. This should be a universal precaution you take by now each and every time you download something off internet. Viruses, spyware, and pornography can very easily be hidden in files that you download - prevention in this case is much easier than fixing problem after files have already made their way onto your hard drive. Only download files from sources that you trust, and if you ever have a question as to whether something contains a virus or pornography, do NOT download it.
| | Internet 'Grey Areas'Written by Daniel Punch
The Internet has opened up whole new avenues of freedom for people: freedom of information, thoughts and ability to achieve anonymity while still being active in a community. This freedom has been latched onto by a large proportion of Internet user base and has fuelled a desire for even more liberties. This in turn has given rise to 'Internet Grey Areas', those little things that 'everyone' does but which aren't quite legally correct. A few examples are Abandonware, MP3 downloads, warez and their kind.Abandonware is label applied to games that have been 'abandoned' by their original developers. The standard rule has become that if games are more than four years old and no longer freely available for purchase, or if developer has closed and hence game is no longer supported, then it can be called Abandonware and distributed freely. Some developers willingly release their older software titles into public domain making them legally Abandonware but a large number of titles labelled as such are not technically free for public access. The licences are still owned by someone and distribution of their software titles could be harming their licence validity. Abandonware justifies itself by preserving gaming history in a 'living' way. It allows people to play games they used to love long after they're available to purchase. In many cases only hope for finding older games is to trawl second hand shops and online stores such as Ebay in slim hopes of coming across a particular title. Sometimes when you finally get hold of old software it simply won't run on your PC leaving you with a pretty box but no closer to actually playing game. Several times I've purchased an old game and then downloaded a copy off Internet so that I can actually play it due to fact that old disks are either damaged or wrong type (I don't have a 5 1/4" floppy drive on my PC any more...). MP3 downloads have a less honourable ideology. Simply put, people want free music so they download it. It is said that activities harm no one and that downloading process doesn't adversely affect artists' profits. Who can say for sure? At time of writing this article RIAA's site is down and I'm not able to find any accurate figures that estimate amount of revenue lost due to music piracy. I believe that it was estimated at around $5 billion in 1997 and that's sure to have increased with advent of broadband. However, these figures are said to be highly inaccurate. A standard argument against them is "I wasn't planning on buying CD anyway so they haven't lost any money out of me downloading it", an argument that is ridiculous at best. The Movie downloading scene is almost identical. I'm not going to swing one way or another here, but I will say that I can think of several films that didn't receive box office takings from a number of associates of mine after they had gotten to experience film before its release date. The quality of films almost justifies stealing, but that's a whole different issue!
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