Strategies to Trap and Hold Viewers by Internet Pornography and Cybersex

While offensive and distasteful to many users, most Internet porn is not illegal. Countries have different cultural standards and legislation regarding sexual material, and content that is banned in one jurisdiction may be easily accessible on servers in another.

For parents, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Internet is the easy access it gives kids to porn. Hard-core sexual images, which were once very difficult to acquire, are now just a mouse click away. Teens, particularly adolescent males, have always been driven by natural curiosity to seek out pornography. This hasn't changed. What's different is the easy access the Internet gives kids to deviant or violent sexual content, which may have an influence on their developing attitudes towards sexuality and relationships.

The Strategies

The online porn industry uses many strategies to promote use of their sites, including:

• Pop-up windows: trap users in an endless loop of porn.
• Home page hijacking: (planting a Java script command on computers to change the user's default home page to a porn site). Changing the home page back to its original setting appears to solve the problem until the computer is rebooted; then the offensive site re-appears as the home page.
• Stealth sites: a variety of techniques, including buying up expired domain names, exploiting common misspellings, or using well-known names of companies or artists.
• Hidden key words that are picked up by search engines: Porn operators bury key words, including brand names of popular toys or names of pop artists, in the code of their Web sites to lead children and teens to their sites.

source: http://www.helpguide.org/