h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...Even if you don't make a habit of going to dodgy porn sites, it is truly amazing how many items of spyware, scumware and viral infections a computer can pick up in the normal course of surfing the Net.

And if you DO go to dodgy porn sites (I would treat them ALL as dodgy - are there any out there that do not dump a load of unwanted content on your hard drive?)then upon your own head be it... my objection to net porn isn't so much the moral aspect, it's that the world it operates from is intrinsically seedy and sleazy with low ethical standards. Porn could perhaps be seen as a way of seeking to distribute scumware to dupes while they're otherwise engaged looking at the pictures?

As an absolute minimum, have one good AV program and one good anti-spyware program on your computer and update them regularly: run checks at least weekly. You would be surprised!

I have a hobby - historical interest in the Second World War - which often involves extensive Net searches to track down the photos and references I need. My particular interest is in the Eastern Front, and especially in filling in the blanks in my understanding by using the new information that's been coming out of Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Any historian interested in this period can tell you about the sheer frustration of only having the official, and somewhat skewed, Communist Party line to go by re. Russia's involvement in WW2: historical fact was thin on the ground prior to the early nineties)

This means I've occassionally had to go to websites which can be classed as "dodgy" for other reasons: it's hard to identify pro-Nazi, apologist, or holocaust-denying websites from the brief spiels you get on a Yahoo or Google search page, and unfortunately things like this come as part of the turf when doing legit research on Nazi Germany. (They're an education, though: while repulsive, at least you get a view into the sort of mindset that denies the holocaust happens, and the "arguments" they use to defend this viewpoint)

Similarly, some of the Russian websites, while undeniably informative on the military hardware and the technical specs, seem to have a dodgy historical grounding: Russian nationalists are still sticking, unquestioned and unchallenged, to the view of history inherited from the Communists (ie, Great Mother Russia has a right to rule the Slavonic world).

Make the mistake of thinking that just because there's a talkboard and a forum there, and you can argue some of the more fallacious opinions, and watch what happens next....

I'm sure, though I can't prove it, that some heavy crap on my computer recently came out of Russia, because I got into a discussion on a talkboard on one or two of these sites and said things they didn't want to hear.

In fact, aren't computer security experts saying that Russia is way ahead of the west in cyberwar techniques? Look at the way they closed down Estonia's internet (a country the right-wing Nationalists say is rightly part of Russia and should be reconquered, btw)


I suspect there may be trouble brewing here?