Drift Net > digital culture
Hijacked By Porn
Every man's dream or a computer owner's nightmare? Being inundated with uninvited porn is hardly a fantasy-come-true.
by Kasey Wehrum | 04.30.2004 ReadMe | Print it.
As the saying goes; be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. My wish for a bevy of beautiful blondes to greet me every morning when I wake up has come true, unfortunately. Despite constantly setting my computer's homepage to CNN.com or some other respectable site, every night the porn fairy comes and befouls my computer, changing my homepage to a XXX playground and flooding my computer with pop-up ads so risque they would make Hugh Hefner blush. Of course, the worst part of being hijacked by porn is the assumption that I brought this curse upon myself, by venturing into the realm of adult websites.  | | Being surrounded by beautiful women isn't all it's cracked up to be. No, Seriously. | On my Boy Scout's Honor, I never did. Stop laughing, I really never did. You think I doth protest too much? It wasn't until I read the story of a sweet 67-year-old grandmother suffering the same X-rated nightmare on Wired.com that I had the courage to come forward and tell my story. Apparently the culprit is a browser-hijacking program called CoolWebSearch, perhaps the most annoying thing ever invented. CoolWebSearch acts as a gateway for porn sites to invade your computer; programmed with the tenacity of a bulldog, once it enters, it never leaves. Friends borrow my laptop and return it with a quiet look of disgust, suggesting that I should get out of my apartment more. CoolWebSearch has brandished me with a scarlet "A," a tag I believe unjustified. So here I am, a modern day Sisyphus, only my boulder is an inbox full of lewd pictures that I have to clear from my computer every morning. A pox on CoolWebSearch for forcing my very own computer to turn against me. I'm no angel, but I am certainly not the trenchcoat wearing, porn-addicted freak my laptop makes me out to be.
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