You might as well admit it: porn is one of the driving industries in most countries today. In fact, it's been said that VHS eventually won the video cassette battle over Betamax mainly because the porn industry was in full support of the VHS standard. Industry estimates peg the porn industry in the United States as generating about US$1.8 billion in revenues annually. Now, add that to every porn industry in every country and you have an idea of how expansive such a sensitive and often embarrassing thing is.
In the past, it was relatively hard to get porn. If you felt the urge to ogle at naked people doing the nasty with each other, you had to either go to a peep show, rent some videos at your local video house, or secretly buy girly mags somewhere. With the advent of the Internet, however, porn access has become very easy; in fact, the Internet is probably the sole reason right now why porn has risen (no pun intended) in consumption. Suddenly, access is just a couple of keystrokes and mouse clicks away, and all in high-def quality to boot.
The Internet Is For Porn!
As that famous song from Avenue Q goes, the Internet is indeed a goldmine of pornographic materials. Once your computer is connected to the world wide web, it can become your one stop porn shop. What's more, it affords you privacy in ways that the old methods do not. Gone are the days when you have to hide your porn magazines under your bed or in a secret stash under a loose board. Porn stashed on your computer also is not in danger of being destroyed by the elements, unless your hard drive itself gets fried.
There are times, however, when you have to remove the porn from your computer. For example:
•When you were not the one who downloaded the porn. It happens, of course, that you lend your computer to a friend or your younger brother for one afternoon while you work. Then, when you come home, you find a new porn folder in your My Documents, among other things. On top of that, there are now new pop ads appearing in your browser.
•When you have to show a presentation to the board of directors using your laptop. You might think it's unlikely, but it happens more than you think. You have your presentation ready, you fire up the projector, and now everyone in the room can see the contents of your My Documents including, unfortunately, the folder titled Porn.
•When other people are going to use your computer while you're at work. It can't be helped that sometimes, other people are going to use your computer. It can either be for research purposes or they just want to be entertained while they're waiting for you to finish your business somewhere. In cases like these, it's better that they do not see anything in your computer that will be cause for really uncomfortable situations. After all, you don't want your grandmother to see that you have gay porn in your document folders, don't you?
•When you're going to sell your computer. Prospective buyers are likely excited about the size of your hard drive, not the amount of porn you've got stored on it.
Porn Free
Fortunately for you, there are a lot of ways to get rid of that porn on your computer; yes, including the ones hidden in your folders without you knowing. So fire up your computer, flex those mouse fingers and start clearing away the porn from your system.
•Put it in the Recycle Bin. The simplest and easiest way to get rid of porn is, of course, to simply delete it. You can highlight the porn files and then hit the 'Delete' key on your keyboard, or simply click and drag them to the recycle bin. If you are like 90% of the people out there, you most probably have a folder dedicated to porn. If that's the case, then it becomes a simple matter of just clicking the whole folder and then hitting 'Delete'. Such easy accessibility is one of the reasons why you should place all your porn in one folder.
•Use third-party software to clean up your porn from the computer. Here's a fact: even if you have deleted the files and emptied the recycle bin, they are not actually truly deleted. Any skilled hacker or computer technician can still restore them. The reason for this is that there are still traces of the files in data form embedded in your system. In order for you to really render them “deleted” you have to overwrite the uncommitted areas of your disk with selected patterns of 1's and 0's, repeatedly. The good news is that there are several programs that enable you to do this.
One of the more reliable programs out there is PGP, which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”. It is available for most operating systems and platforms and it uses military strength strong cryptography in order to validate your data. One of its tools is File Wipe, which will really delete any file you want. In most operating systems, when you delete a file, you only delete the pointer to the file's location; it's not really gone. The file wipe utility of PGP directly overwrites the file's data with pseudo-random data up to thirty-two times, ensuring that that file will never be usable again.
Other third party software programs you can use to delete porn from your computer include Ccleaner and NetEraser. Both applications are capable of also deleting the cookies, bookmarks and history in your computer so other inquisitive eyes will not be able to stumble upon the porn sites you visited in the past.
•Stop visiting porn sites. The best way to get rid of porn from your computer, however, is not to visit these websites in the first place. Some porn sites actually embed trojan viruses in your computer, causing you pop up porn ads or even redirecting you to their site once you open a browser.
There really isn't much you have to do to get rid of porn from your computer. It is, after all, just files, and the more malicious ones can readily be tracked down by the majority of today's malware and spyware. With a little bit of luck, you should be able to have a porn-free computer terminal in no time. If you enjoyed reading this article, might as well read how to block explicit web content