Internet Pornography and Cybersex

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

Cybersex is very addictive especially for teens, particularly male adolescents, who have always been driven by natural curiosity to seek out pornography. Hard-core sexual images, which were once very difficult to acquire, are now just a mouse click away.

The online pornography 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. However, when the computer is rebooted, 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.

Once Internet users get a glimpse of the pornographic websites, some may turn away in disgust but most of them might get sexually aroused and voluntarily enter these sites. They would indulge in the activity and subconsciously get addicted to cyber-porn and thus, contracting Internet Addiction Disorder.