Porn and Politicians and Paranoia too

Sometimes I get worried about my obsessions, especially when they lead me astray and I get clobbered with hexually-transmitted diseases. I like to look through the web to see what other people are fascinated by. I think it makes me feel more balanced to know that I am not alone in wanting to see or read about unusual sexual behaviour.

It is, of course, a topical subject here in England at the moment, because of the partner of someone in a high position having watched two porn movies which were subsequently included on an expense account which was then covered by taxpayers funds. The business of who paid for them is, I think, the important issue here, although it is peanuts by comparison to some other "little" fiddles that have been dragged up from the music cupboard recently.

The issue that is really being hammered in the media, though, is that somebody watched porn. I cannot understand why this is newsworthy at all. What, I wonder, is so strange about somebody watching erotic videos? That is why they were made in the first place, isn't it? Are we really still so repressed sexually that the majority of people in this country believe that sex is purely for procreation?

Anyway, I wander about the web from time to time seeing what makes other people tick, and I know from conversations that other people also do, too. Of course, there are risks involved. Some people claim it makes you go blind. Others warn you that porn sites are the ones most likely to give your computer something to make its private parts sore and itchy for a time, and it was one of these sites which I got caught by.

I knew I was taking a risk, not only because I was using Windows XP and not Linux, but because I was using an older version of Mozilla instead of the more modern Firefox. This was because I was fed up with the Firefox updates regularly upsetting plug-ins which had previously worked, and so I had reverted to a Mozilla version which would still do the little tricks I wanted. The browser itself might be irrelevant to what happened anyway, but I cannot say for certain. I had a few tabs open, because I was going through those annoying sites which have collections of thumbnails which you think are going to lead you to a page of pictures, but which instead lead to another site full of thumbnails which lead you to a page, and so on.

What happened is that I had several tabs open, and when a popup popped up saying would I like to download a codec update so I could view the page properly I clicked on the little "x" in the top right corner to kill the popup, not trusting the "NO" button. Another popup appeared claiming that a virus had been detected on my hard drive and inviting me to click to have it removed. I tried the back button to move off the page but was in what is called a browser-trap, I was stuck on the page, which had also switched the browser from windowed into full-screen mode. I clicked on the "x" in the top right corner, and this time heard an ominous beeping. I killed the whole set of open tabs and when the browser window died, I found myself facing a white-coloured desktop with larger than normal icons.

I right-clicked on the desktop, intending to reset the screen size, and found I couldn't. I tried to get the task manage window, and got a message saying that it had been disabled by an administrator. I rebooted, and there was the same white desktop, wrong screen resolution, and lack of task manager.

At times like this it is a great relief to have an alternate, and I fortunately had two; a laptop and a linux partition on the compromised machine. I went online and googled around, and soon got an idea of what I had got, and it wasn't pleasant. Smitfraud, it was called. I found several free tools to play around with and tried to make the problem go away. After a bit of fiddling with Spybot, Hijack this, some malware removal programs and the msconfig utility I managed to get the task manager back, lost the fake white desktop picture, and resized the screen. Now I could start hunting through the windows folders to see what was going on.

I added Zonealarm and began to see what was trying to ask for internet access, and got a name, twice, called Psyche. Google turned up very little about this, just a hint it was a particularly clever tool. On a whim, I called up the dos box and tried netstat, and saw the window fill up and overflow. I found my copy of Tcpview, ran it, and realised that although I had apparently cleaned up Smitfraud with the free tools which said that they would do the trick, what was left behind, or possibly put there in place of the Smitfraud collection, was a spammers delight. My machine was a relay station for 200 or more open connections.

Paranoia is a wonderful gift. Not the mad bad type which leads sufferers to stalk round parks and back streets with carving knives looking for someone that a little voice will tell them is sending them coded messages via a radio receiver implanted in their tooth. I'm talking about the one which says "If your machine is compromised, what else is it being used for besides spam? Supposing someone is using your PC to hack into the Pentagon, or to launch DDOS attacks against a betting shop web-server as part of a blackmail attempt. Suppose the authorities come looking for you based on the IP address? What then?"

My first instinct was to delete the hard disk, refresh it from a backup image I had taken a few weeks earlier, restore the few additional programs I had added since the image, and get back to the serious business of downloading porn. I had now gone for four days without any flickering images, and I was feeling the lack of titillation. But another part of me said that if I did that, and the authorities did come anyway and demand to see my machine because it had possibly been used to breach Pentagon security, the act of having recently wiped and then restored the hard disk could be taken as the sign of a guilty conscience. If the compromised hard disk were still there it would serve as evidence that I was indeed the victim of malicious outsiders.

Then another part of me chipped in to say that the large quantity of porn on the hard disk would then compromise me in a different way. True, it was what you might call "OK" porn, all adults stuffing and being stuffed, but some of it was not what you would call vanilla, and there are laws creeping into place in this country which are not going to look kindly upon people seeing images of other people doing things that are not considered normal by those who make our laws and control the authorities who enforce them.

It is claimed, by several bodies, that there is a direct connection between films depicting violence against women and instance of rape. This is one of the reasons given for bringing in the new laws, that the unrestricted circulation of certain types of films will promote a rise in a certain type of crime. There might be some truth in it, for I have noticed that one of the favourite weapons of the serial psychopath who crops up again and again on the screen is the knife, and there are claims that knife crime has risen somewhat over the past few years.

But here, we get an interesting dichotomy. The government claim that knife crime is not on the increase, rather, that it has decreased in the time that they have been in power. Their figures have tried to show that the UK, when considered as a set of statistics, is a much safer place to live than it used to be. Against this, we have their claim that viewing certain crimes in film and on TV promotes that crime amongst some of the more impressionable viewers. I think that, as an experiment, they should try banning all films which depict wounding and killing using knives, and see if there is a corresponding fall in knife crime.

But they won't bother, because they have it on good advice that they are right. And it still didn't help my paranoia any, in fact, the thought that my collection of porn might have me thrown into room 101 for thought crime against a fantasy figure inside my head made things even worse.

I have been paranoid a few times before, and got given some good, free, advice by someone I shall call Debs. She told me that the best way to deal with paranoid thoughts was to go out and tell them, out loud, to someone. Anyone, but preferably a stranger, because then you could empty your head and run away without worrying that what you had said would come back to haunt you later on.

And so that is what I did. I wiped the hard disk, restored the image, went back to hunting porn but this time using linux, and have told you all about my dark fears and nightmares. and so, if the boots do come though the door and the machines are carted away for forensic examination, the claim that I was the innocent victim of a drive-by download hijack is right here, on the web, visible to thousands of witnesses. Well, hundreds. Well, in the case of this blog, three of four, but you're enough for me. The only problem is, you're not exactly strangers, are you?

The problem still remains that our elders and betters, elected by us to represent us and watch over us, are not expected to do the same things that we do. They will never watch porn, for instance, and so will never understand what it means to many of us. That is possibly why they have decided that taking some of it away might be a good thing.

I really wish that we could be governed by peers, who know what it is like to be human, to have to struggle with masses of junkmail and self-assessment forms and nanny our children ourselves and balance the budget each time we go to the petrol pumps or supermarket or pay our utility bills or try to get onto an NHS dentist's waiting list. But no, we are to be watched over by a collection of puritans who have no inner human needs or desires.