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Jerry Ropelato The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 18, 2003. For starters, a couple months ago I was speaking to a group of adults and they introduced me as a porn expert. And I was a little surprised that I quickly corrected them – I’m really, I know a lot more about anti-porn, and so that’s what I plan to talk about a little bit today here. I’ve been asked the question numerous times, “How do you know so much about pornography?” And sometimes I wonder if they’re thinking, “Well, were you, like, a porn addict, or did you work for a porn company?” No, I haven’t. I worked for a company that actually developed and marketed 13 different software anti-pornography products, and through that process I’ve learned a lot about the tricks that pornographers play, some of the problems going on in the pornography industry, and it was good from learning a lot about what the competition does, and when I mean competition, I’m not referring to competitors in the software market – I’m referring to the pornographers. I want to tell you a little story. I was working on one of my technology books here a number of years ago, and if you’ve ever written a book, there’s an enormous amount of time involved in writing a book. And as I went through this process, it took me about a year, and every spare minute that I had, I would be in my home office and I’d spend weekends and evenings. I’d get up at four o’clock, four-thirty in the morning, and I just lived in that office. It was almost like I was hibernating in there. Well, my family, they knew that that office was almost off-limits. If they went in, I’d get kind of cranky and testy, always interrupting a thought, and so for a long time none of the family members would even step foot into my office. One day I was there working, and my son Jeff, he came down the stairs. Now Jeff had been home from his mission for about a year. And he came down the stairs, and he said, “Hey, Pops, how’s the book coming?” And I said, “Oh, it’s going. It’s coming pretty good.” He got a little closer, and he says, “So what are you working on?” And so he came into my office – now it’s been 3 years since he’s stepped foot into my office. Just as he stepped foot in, I’d just typed in “google.com” in a search engine, I go to Google. And just as he walked in, I realized a Russian pornographic site came up on my screen. And I’d typed in “googlle” with two L’s, just accidentally. Jeff walked in, he looked at that, and he says, “Oh, so that’s what you’re working on.” And I said, “Jeff, stop, stop! I’ve got to explain this.” And he said, “Dad, you don’t need to explain.” And he just left. Well, that was my first experience with pornography on the internet. It caught me off guard, I wasn’t prepared for it, I got a little angry, and I thought, “How could they do this to me? I didn’t do anything wrong.” But the pornographers did – they set me up, and I didn’t like that. That was my first experience, and we’re going to talk about some things like that here today. I didn’t attend BYU, but I am a BYU football fan, and you guys have a great coach, Coach Crowton. Now I think a lot of him and what he’s done for the team, and I wanted to talk about him for just a second. When BYU plays their football games on Saturday, as soon as the game’s over, I heard Coach Crowton say this once, that as soon as the game’s over, they go back and they start looking at game film of next week’s opponent. And they’ll spend that evening, and come Monday morning, they’re ready to go with their game plan. They’ve identified all the strengths and the weaknesses of their opponent, they know exactly what it’s going to take to beat them, and so all week long, they’ve implemented their strategy getting ready for the following game. Well, if you play this analogy, a football analogy, to pornographers and to us, you could say that the pornographers are out on the field, and they’re throwing long bomb, Hail Mary passes, and they’re scoring. They’re doing end sweeps and they’re scoring. They’ll do a reverse and a double reverse and a triple reverse, and every time they touch the ball, they score. Well, we in this room are on the opposite side of the field. Now you may say, “Why are they scoring all the time?” Well, when you look at it, there’s probably a couple of us out on the field going up against their eleven players. There’s a number of us standing on the sidelines, wondering, “Should I go in the game, should I not?” There’s others of us who are in the dressing room, they’re putting on their pads. There’s others of us who forgot that it was even game day today. There’s others of us who are on the team but we don’t even know we’re on the team. And when you look at this from a pornographer’s perspective, they have figured out the strategies, they’ve been studying us, they know our strengths and our weaknesses, and they’ve implemented as part of their game plan all the strategies to beat us. And they’re very good at it. When you look at it, they don’t look at it as a game, though; they look at it as big business, and when I say big business, to the tune of 57 billion dollars worldwide, and when you look at that, the internet portion of that is generating 2.5 billion dollars. Now when you look at the total 57 billion, if you add up all the revenues from all of the sports teams and the franchises in professional baseball, professional basketball, and professional football, it would not total this 57 billion. Today we’re going to talk about cyber porn and internet safety and the things that you need to know, because they are coming after you. This isn’t something where I go out and look for porn; they are aggressively targeting you. We’re going to talk about cyber porn tricks and dangers, how that applies to the worldwide web. We’re going to talk about e-mail, chat, we’re going to talk about peer-to-peer applications. If you have to go to sleep, sleep now. When I get to peer-to-peer applications, I want your full attention, and I’ll explain why when we get there. Internet safety, we’re going to talk about some solutions and what you can do to help protect yourself, your spouse, your kids, whatever the case may be. How big is the problem on the worldwide web? There are 35 million internet websites, and this is according to Google. Of those, 12 percent are pornographic – that’s 4.2 million websites in existence as far as being pornographic. Daily searchable and requests – there’s 270 million every single day; 68 million or 25 percent of those are pornographic in nature. So that means 68 million times every single day, someone in the world is doing some kind of pornographic search. That’s fairly large. Let’s talk about myths and facts. Myths: pornography – how many times have you heard this, “Well, there’s no pornography in our home,” or, “My children aren’t using it”? I remember giving a little talk in high priest quorum one day, and the next week one of the members came up to me and he said, “Well, it was a great lesson, but I know my kids would never be into that.” And I want to share a few stats with you. Average age of first internet exposure to pornography: 11 years old. Largest consumer of internet pornography: 12- to 17-year-old age group is the largest consumer. How many 15- to 17-year-olds have had multiple exposures to hard-core pornography? 80 percent – now that’s four out of five children. And that’s growing. Men admitting to accessing pornography at work: 20 percent – that’s one out of five. Women admitting to accessing pornography at work: that’s 13 percent, or one out of eight. US adults who regularly visit pornographic websites: 40 million. To recent promise keepers, men who had viewed pornography in the last week alone, when they’re there making promises about their spouses and that, 53 percent in the last week. There’s a recent Christian study that said, “How many of you in the survey felt that pornography was a major problem in their home?” 47 percent. Is pornography in your home with your children? Odds are stacked against you that it is. Another myth: good Church members are immune from pornography. Fact: there are no religious boundaries, even for BYU students. I’ve given a lot of speeches on a lot of different topics over the years, and whenever you talk about pornography, especially like a youth group or a high priest group or a priesthood group, some things I’ve noticed. One, you can hear a pin drop. You have 100 percent attention when you’re talking about pornography. People take it very serious. Two. When you’re looking out and speaking to a group, especially in the Church, and you’re talking about pornography and you’re trying to make eye contact, many, many times you lose that. The person will not even look you straight in the face because they’ve got a problem and they know they’ve got a problem, and it’s hard to deal with that. I will commend BYU for putting on this conference and recognizing there is a major problem out there. Myth: if I don’t go looking for pornography, it won’t find me. Fact: pornographers are aggressive marketers; they’re very, very good at tricks. We’re going to talk about some of those tricks right now. Porn napping – porn napping is a term where people will actually pick up your domain name, and let me go through an example here. Moneyopolis.com was a website owned by Ernst and Young, a top accounting firm. It was a site for kids where they could go and learn about investing and learn about finances at a very young age. A clerical error allowed their domain name registration to expire, and an actual pornographic site picked that up and purchased it and turned it into a pornographic site. The kids were still coming there. Does this happen a lot? Yes, it does. There are over 2 million expirations of domain names occurring every single month, and so it’s very easy for someone to pick up a domain that’s an active one and turn it into a pornography site. Cyber squatting – here’s another one where someone will actually go out and purchase a domain name that really probably shouldn’t be theirs. An example: if I’m going to do some research on the White House, where would you think you would go? Probably your first reaction would be “whitehouse.com.” “Whitehouse.com” is a porn site. “Whitehouse.org” is actually a website that does a parody on the president, and “whitehouse.gov” is the real website that you would think. “TourdeFrance.com,” “EugeneOregon.com,” “CivilWarBattles.com” are all pornographic websites. You would never know that. Doorway scams – here’s another interesting thing that they do. I can do a search, like, for Meg Ryan and Britney Spears or a very popular celebrity, and you think you’re going to get information on them. In reality, you end up going to a pornographic site that has nothing to do with the celebrity. I can type in something as innocent as “livestock,” and I can end up actually going to a porn site on bestiality. Here’s the actual example I experienced on Google here. “Googlle” with two L’s is an actual Russian pornographic site. Google has since purchased that domain name to get control back of that. With the misspelling, though, it’s real easy for kids to type in, like, if they’re going to “Disney.com” and they put in two E’s instead of one, they actually go to a gambling site. Or if I try and type in “Abercrombie and Fitch,” and I put an M in there, I’ll actually go to a porn site. “Gurl,” which is a very popular girl’s site, is spelled G-U-R-L - if someone types in G-I-R-L, they’ll actually go to a porn site. False advertising – here’s an interesting one. Have you ever thought about all the banner ads and things when you’re out surfing the internet, when you click on them typically you expect to go to that particular site that was advertised. That’s not always the case. A lot of pornographers will actually submit their information to advertisers with the links, the advertisers will go through and check them out, and right before it goes live the pornographic site will actually swap out the landing page, and so when you go there thinking it may be a Pepsi ad, it actually takes you to a pornographic site. Some of the other tricks they play is sometimes you’ll get like a little system error messages popping on your screen. You click on those thinking you’ve got an error message and in reality it’s just an advertisement that takes you to a porn site. Another one is invisible seeding, or what they call spoof pages. There’s a couple types of this, a couple functions related to this. One, it’s very easy to go into HTML code, which is the language that most websites are based off of, and it’s easy to change what’s called a metatag and put in some things, innocent things like “Disney,” “baseball,” and “locomotives,” so that when you’re searching for Disney in a search engine, a search engine may bring up this particular website, “sex.com,” as a valid Disney site. And so there’s a lot of tricks they play there. There’s 25 million websites that have been page-hijacked, which means they actually copy the actual page over, they add some pornographic information to it, and they’ll resubmit it through the search engines so the search engines will actually bring up an innocent site, you click on it to go to it, and you’re actually taken to a pornographic site. Here’s another one, a homepage alteration. And this is where you’re actually at a website and you may get a little popup window that says, “Do you want to change your homepage?” In other words, the page that first starts up when you enter a browser – 1.4 percent of all websites do this. Now a lot of the porn sites, they run a lot of tricks, so if you accidentally get to one, you might get this box. Some of them, it doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no, they change your homepage, so the next time someone boots up the computer – it could be your daughter, your child, your spouse – it will automatically take you to that porn site, and if you don’t know how to unset that, it can be very serious. So sometimes you can answer yes/no, and it does matter what you answer – they’ll change that. Another one’s called “scumware links,” and many times you can actually get some applications downloaded onto your computer and you may not be aware of it, and these scumware links will actually swap out any word on a website. So in this particular example, the word “find.” When I click on the word “find” on this link, it will actually take me to a pornographic site. And it doesn’t matter which website I go to – if it found the word “find,” it would take you to a porn site. And there’s a number of applications that do this. Let’s talk a little bit about entrapment, being trapped on the internet. If I accidentally go to a porn site, and if you’ve experienced that, you’ve found in most cases that you can’t close them down. Many times the faster you try and hit your close button to shut your browser off, the faster they just keep spawning new pornographic websites. Mousetrapping’s another interesting trick they play, so if you do get to a particular porn site, many times the back button, they disable it, or the close button, the little X in the upper right-hand corner in a Windows machine actually won’t allow you to close it. They just disable it. Many times they’ll put fake close windows, so when you go to hit the close function, it actually takes you to another porn site. Let’s talk about downloads for a second, dangerous downloads. You’ve probably heard of Trojan horses, the big thing with anti-virus and it’s how you actually load improper things on your computer and there’s a lot of tricks and viruses out there. Well, some of these are related to pornographic – the pornographers actually use these. Sometimes they’ll change your setup program, sometimes they’ll change your browser settings, and sometimes instead of maybe downloading music or a calendar or a puzzle which you think you’re getting, what you’re actually getting is some porn types of functions out there. And there’s a number of programs that do this. Here’s another interesting download, and it’s called a dialers scam. This comes in many forms – sometimes it’s a 1-900 dialer program, sometimes it’s a little Sony Playstation advertisement, an e-mail. Regardless, when you click on that, basically if it’s either the site or a porn site, it doesn’t matter where – a little teaser will appear prompting a downloaded dialer. So you go ahead and you download this dialer, and maybe it’s your child who really doesn’t know what they’re doing. They download the dialer. The dialer immediately disconnects from your current local ISP where you’re connected to from an internet perspective, and it’ll take and actually dial an international number, go overseas to an actual porn site, put you right into that, and all of a sudden you’re now into a porn site, but the bad news, at the end of the month you’re getting hit with an 8 dollar per minute charge through your ISP service. Here’s another one – you probably remember the movie called “Truman.” It was a story about a baby that had been raised, and it’s 100 percent reality television, so they had televisions on him 24 hours a day. That is true in today’s world, and there’s been a lot of reality shows. Now you can go onto the internet and you can actually see people doing anything from a pornographic perspective live. There are actually webcams in bedrooms, they can be in showers, they can even be in the toilets, believe it or not – it’s pretty sick stuff out there. Technology is at its worst. E-mail has become a big part of our presence on the internet. It used to be e-mail, and then it got a little annoying and it turned into spam, and then spam kind of went a little further, and you started getting porn e-mails, and now it’s gotten a little further where you actually get what I call “sporn,” spammed porn. Every single day there are 31 billion e-mails sent out worldwide. When you look at that, 2.5 billion every single day, or 8 percent of every single e-mail that is sent out, is pornographic in nature. Now when you equate that to the number of internet users in the world, that means on average there are 4.5 pornographic e-mails sent out every single day to every single person on the internet. It doesn’t mean they necessarily receive them, because there’s a lot of bad e-mail addresses out there, but it’s very prevalent in the world today. E-mail tricks – you know, how do they get your e-mail address in the first place if you didn’t go ask for porn? It’s actually very easy, because they’ll target a lot of the accounts, like your AOL accounts, your Hotmail accounts, your large ISPs, and there are just little programs out there that will go and look for, like, “Jerry01,” “Jerry02,” “Jerry03,” and it will just go through various iterations trying to find a valid e-mail address. Now how do the pornographers know if it’s a valid e-mail address? The worst thing you can do is answer one, or do an unsubscribed, because then you’ve just told the pornographer that “I’m a valid, live e-mail account.” That’s the worst thing you can do. One of the other tricks they play is called e-mail spoofing, and so sometimes you can get an e-mail in your inbox, and you may not notice that there’s a little executable attachment attached to it. If you accidentally click on that, there’s actual programs out there that will actually go out and read all of your directory, so all of the people you send e-mails to, it will take and send a pornographic e-mail to all of your friends coming from you. Pretty embarrassing. Here’s one that just came out recently as well: “You’ve received an E-card; click here to open.” This particular one actually would take you to a pornographic website. These are pretty popular, people send them around, and how do you know? Let’s talk about chat for a minute. Chat’s a big thing in the world today. Chat is where you can have real time conversations in between 2 to 20 people all online at the same time. There’s over 100 million people daily who use chat. There’s 18 million people who use instant messaging at work, and 13 million youth who use instant messaging every single day. Now let’s talk about what are the risks with chat. Well, lots of time people who go into chat rooms are those who are curious, they may want to know what’s going on, they may have a valid need. There’s others that have had some problems in their life and they just want to talk to someone, and so they’re hurting. It’s a great place for predators to go to. If you look at Utah’s Internet Crimes Against Children taskforce, they are making over 2 arrests every single week of people trying to go after our children here in the state of Utah. That’s 2 per week. Chat is just a playground for pedophiles. There was a company who did a little study, and they were trying to figure out if they could figure out people without personal information, and they actually were talking to some girl in a chat room, and they found out which high school she went to, they found out that she played in a band, that she was female, and that she was a senior. Really no personally information given out there you would think. They narrowed that person down from 551 million worldwide internet users down to 3 because they had an online yearbook, so yes, even chat can be dangerous when you don’t give out really personal information. Addiction is another problem with chat. Sometimes kids can spend hours and hours and hours in chat rooms, and it’s not healthy. Here’s another chat risk – they’re called bots, or robots. Bots are little programs that just run out there, and they’ll actually communicate with people in a chat room, and here’s a list here of about 20 chat bots, but there are literally hundreds of them. They’re not all bad – some are more of an artificial intelligence. Here’s an actual AOL instant messenger session, okay, an actual chat session going on here. Can you tell me by looking at these who are the humans and who are the bots? It’s very difficult. The underlined ones here are the actual bots. There’s four programs running, and you could be in a chat room talking to something that isn’t even human. And the sad thing is, I can actually have a bot put a link in there so I can click on the link, and it will actually take me to a pornographic site right from a chat session. Now, the most important thing I can share with you. It’s what I call peer-to-peer networks. I personally believe this is the largest threat of pornography from an internet perspective in the near future that I can see. Peer-to-peers are great, it’s great technology, but if it’s used improperly it can be a bad thing. Probably most of you have heard of Napster. Well, Napster is a form of a peer-to-peer network. Even though they’re in bankruptcy right now, there’s actually a pornographic company out of Madrid, Spain, that is trying to actually purchase Napster to turn it into a porn peer-to-peer site. I would like to tell you a story. I had a former employee, and he would stay late at work at nights and he would actually go and use another employee’s computer, and he was using the high-speed access to the internet going through a peer-to-peer network to actually download full-motion pornographic videos. Well, this went on for quite a while, and finally he’d been discovered, and the very next day he came in – I have to tell you, he was an elders quorum president – and after we caught him, he went home that night, he came in the next day, and he resigned just out of embarrassment. Now I don’t know how he went home and told his wife that “I just quit my job, and here’s the reason why.” I think that would have been very difficult. Peer-to-peer networks – how big is the problem? There’s 150 million users using peer-to-peer; that’s 4.3 billion shared files per month. Now when you look at that, 35 percent of those are pornographic downloads. Now when you look at that, that’s 1.5 billion downloads of pornographic information every month. Now here’s an interesting one – Nutella, which happens to be a very popular peer-to-peer network, they had 464,000 search requests over a 4-day period looking for child pornography. Pretty scary. What is peer-to-peer? Peer-to-peer is basically a style of networking where computers communicate directly with each other as opposed to going through a normal server that you would find in a company. So in other words, I may be going through a peer to peer to someone in China, it’s just a home user, it has nothing to do with a business. Another interesting thing is you can share all of your files on your computer – it could be one file, it could be your entire directory, it could be your entire hard drive. You may not even know that’s occurring on your computers. It has nothing to do with websites or web browsers; it’s a separate application that you actually install on your computer. There’s three main protocols: Napster, Nutella, and FreeNet, and there are a lot of free file-sharing programs. We’ll talk about those in just a second. Now typically peer to peer it was popular for downloading MP3 files, or music files. Well, pornography has really taken over. Now why is this – well, let me explain first: there are a number of file-sharing programs. You’ve got LimeWire, Morpheus, Bearshare, Kazaa, Nutella – if you see any of these on your computer; it’s been your spouse, or it may be one of your kids have installed this, you probably should start asking some questions. And the reason I say that is because in all honesty, peer to peer networking is great technology, but in my opinion, probably 99 percent of what goes on in peer to peer networking is either illegal or immoral, because basically you’re giving out files that you don’t own typically. Here’s a peer to peer activity report as of a week ago. It was nine-thirty in the morning. Of the top 100 searches that occurred, 37 of them were related to pornography, porn being the number one search. Why should I use peer to peer, or why would someone use peer to peer to gain access to pornography? One, it’s free downloads – there’s no credit card necessary. Now if you go out to the internet, there’s a lot of still pictures, but if you really want what they call the “good stuff,” you’ve got to pay for that. Most filters on the market do not block peer to peer, so even though you may have a filter at home, typically most of them do not block it. It’s totally anonymous - you cannot tell where your data is coming from, whereas on the internet, the FBI can track back certain individuals. You can’t do that through peer to peer, or through most of the protocols. It’s worldwide access to individual sharing. “Download.com,” which is owned by Seaned, actually downloaded 3.1 million free peer to peer applications in a single week. One other interesting thing is why kids would use peer to peer is especially with broadband or what’s called high-speed internet access, or DSL – there’s numerous terms for it. I can now download full-length, 30-minute, 60-minute, full-motion pornographic videos, no longer the stills. And so what used to be just looking at a picture on a screen now can be a full-motion video. Let’s talk a little bit about filters and parental controls. What are some of the solutions that I have here to help out here? With the power of the internet, the question is to filter or not to filter, and there’s a lot of debate on that. My personal feelings on that, are filters enough? Now I had the opportunity to debate with a woman from back East at a debate on filtering here a couple of months ago. And obviously her stance was she didn’t want filters, and she took the stance that children should be able to experience everything on the internet and that that’s part of learning about life, it’s reality and life, and filters do you no good from that perspective. And she used a little analogy about a swimming pool, and she said, “Kids should be in the pool learning how to swim, but when you install a filter, you’re putting a fence up around the pool and so the kids can’t get in.” My counterattack on that was, I told her, “I think you’ve got the wrong analogy. My opinion, kids are in the swimming pool trying to learn how to swim, but you’ve got the pornographers trying to drag them underwater and drown them,” and I truly believe that. Why do filters have such a bad reputation? They’ve been around for about nine years, some of the oldest ones, and many of them are unusable because they’re not perfect. Well, what filter in the world is perfect? Is a kidney dialysis machine perfect? Is a water filtration system perfect? I mean, the list goes on and on – there is no perfect filter out there. Some complain they don’t block enough, some say they block too much and they’re too restrictive. Sometimes they say, “I can’t get past a blocked site that shouldn’t have been blocked.” They’re slow and hard to use. And kids have figured out how to disable them. Let’s talk about that last one for just a second. Kids do the darndest things – they’re pretty smart, and most kids are smarter than their parents. And many times too I’ve noticed especially with college-age students that many times one of the spouses will install a filter, thinking they’ve protected themselves and maybe their husband, when in reality the husband’s figured out a way to get around this, and these are some of the ways they do that, with what’s called a proxy redirection - sometimes rebooting their computer in safe mode. Probably one of the most easy ways to get around a filter is to type in something in a foreign language – in French, Spanish, German – so if I type in “girl” in French, for instance, odds are the first three or four entries that come up in a search engine will be pornographic in nature, and they will go right past most filters on the market today. Not all, but a good portion of them. “Peacefire.org” is a website out there that will actually tell you how to disable filters, believe it or not. Great tool for kids, I guess. Many times the filters don’t support all the protocols, or they don’t block the chat, the e-mail, and other things like that. Sometimes removing registry entries, so kids are pretty smart, pretty ingenious, to getting around filters. What makes a great filter? And I said a great filter, not a good filter, because there’s a lot of good filters on the market. There’s not a lot of great filters on the market. It should be easy to use, easy to install and set up. It should be effective at filtering. It should be a combination of URL blocking, where it actually blocks websites by name. It should also be able to block by certain keywords as part of that. It also should be able block dynamically, so as content changes day by day, you can actually interpret and analyze things on a particular site and act upon that. It should have activity reporting, knowing what my kids have been doing. There’s a lot of debate on this and whether is it better to load software on your PC, which is called client software. It is better to have a filter at your ISP that’s considered server-based. My personal opinion is, I think a combination of the two is the best, and there are some client/server-based products out there. It should have foreign language website filtering, or at least a good attempt at that. It should be able to block or filter web, chat, e-mail, peer to peer, bulletin boards, and popups. It should have override capabilities, so if I get blocked for some reason and it shouldn’t have, I can still be effective on the internet and get past it. It should allow you to either get to a site, it should warn you, it should have blocking capabilities, it should be able to set sensitivity settings. I should be able to set up different profiles for each of my family members. I should have some notification capabilities, so when something goes wrong, I’m notified, whether I’m at work or whatever the case may be. It shouldn’t impact my time on the internet, and last, a nice feature is it should have some remote management capabilities where I can actually access things from work or from vacation, see what’s going on. Internet safety solutions – there’s a lot of solutions out there, and I’m not going to recommend any here today. As you can see, I’ve given you a list of probably 30 different companies here. Filtering software, there’s a lot of filtering software products on the market. You have filtered ISPs, you have monitoring software that doesn’t really filter, it just allows you to track what’s going on. I have cleanup utilities and I also have specialized browsers for kids. One of the things that I wanted to share with you, I had an employee once who was working at a client site, and he was a consultant doing some technology consulting there. One day I got a call from the client, and they called and they said, “Hey, Jerry, your employee is here with our new monitoring software.” We found out instead of him working here, doing work for us, he was actually looking at porn all day on the computer. Well, we called the employee in and had a sit-down, frank discussion, basically reiterated our company policy and said, “If it happens again, you’ll be fired, terminated, with no notice. It’ll happen right there.” Well, he agreed. It wasn’t one week later that I got another call from that same client on the same issue. This guy was so deep into addiction into pornography, he couldn’t let it go even at work, even when he knew he was being monitored and when he knew he would be fired. Did we have any idea that this was a problem when we hired him? We didn’t, and it’s very difficult to know that. I get asked just about every presentation I do what is the best filter on the market to buy. And there isn’t one answer that meets everyone’s needs. I mean, a lot of it depends on the individual family – you know, where are the problems they have, what are they trying to resolve with those problems, what are the objectives of the family by purchasing a filter. I’ve been asked so many times that I actually went out and I’m in the process of creating two websites – one’s called “InternetFilterReview.com” and it will be live March 1. It will actually – I’ve gone through an in-depth study on filtering technology, and I’ve gone through and recommended, or not necessarily recommended – I’ve just rated all of them and what their strengths and their weaknesses are. There’s also going to be another one called “FreeInternetFilterReview.com” as well that will evaluate all of the free products out there. Now don’t get your hopes up that there’s some really great free products, because I haven’t seen any free ones yet that are that great. But those will be available March 1. Let’s talk about some internet safety tips, warning signs. Some of you have kids, some of you don’t. Does your child spend large amounts of time online, especially at night? Have you found pornography on your child’s computer? Have you received phone calls from men you don’t know, sometimes long distance calls? Do they receive presents in the mail from people you don’t know? When you walk into the room, does your child turn off the monitor real quickly? Has your child become withdrawn from the family? Is your child using an online account that really isn’t theirs? Those are all warning signs. It doesn’t mean just because one of these happens there is a problem, but they are some warning signs that you should look into. So what should I do? Place your computer in an open room with the monitor facing out – one of the best things you can do right there. Talk with your children about the internet, bookmark child-friendly websites, make it easy for them to go to a safe site, teach your children to avoid giving out personal information, share your learning with others. As you’ve run into experiences both good and bad, share it with other people. Stay out of chat rooms – there’s not a lot of good that comes out of chat rooms. Don’t install P-to-P applications. Again, there’s not a lot of great things that can come from P-to-P if you’re concerned about legal issues and moral issues. Teach children to crash and tell, and by that, what I mean is, if they come across something that they don’t know how it got there or it’s pornographic in nature, tell them to shut the computer off and come talk to the parents about it. Teach them to never agree to meet with anyone that they’ve met online in person unless they’ve got the parents’ approval, and know the parents of your children’s friends. Another tip: check your web browser history regularly. Basically it’s real easy to just, and there’s numerous ways to do it, but typically you can go down and look at your history, and it will bring something up on the left-hand side, and you can see where your kids have been. This typically comes in all of your browsers and it’s free out there and it’s very easy to do. I’d like to share a story with you. At a former company I worked for, customer service had a call come in one day, and it was a lady calling in and she was concerned about some things she had found in her browser history. She was looking it over and she wanted to use one of our products to help audit her computer, which she did, and she called back a second time to re-understand what she was looking at, because she said, “I found a lot of pornography on my computer. I just want to make sure what I’m looking at is valid.” So they helped her through it and sure enough it was valid pornography. She said, “Well, I was afraid of that. My son was addicted to pornography and we had him in counseling years ago and we thought we had gotten it resolved.” And she said, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do.” Because this pornography was there from a week ago, and she said, “I’ve got to call my stake president because my son left on his mission three days ago. I’ve got to call and have him come home.” And you know, what a tough telephone call to have to make because of pornography. Check your cookies regularly. Cookies are little objects that websites will leave on your machine, and sometimes kids are smart enough to delete the history and you can look at your cookies – it’s fairly easy to do. If you see something out there like from Penthouse or Playboy or something like that, it’s probably a clue that they’ve been there. I wanted to talk just real quickly about the internet as a whole. The internet in my opinion is one of the greatest inventions of all time, and it’s a great tool, but with the internet comes what I call the dark side of the internet. And that dark side, understanding that there is a dark side, that pornography is there, can help you and your family have a safer experience on the internet and use one of the greatest tools ever invented. I recently picked up a pamphlet, and I’ve read it numerous times over the years, but I just recently read it again. It’s “For the Strength of Youth” pamphlet and probably most of you have read it. I reread the section entitled “Entertainment and the Media,” and I’d just like to quote one little paragraph out of this in closing: “Pornography is a poison that weakens your self-control, changes the way you see others, causes you to lose the guidance of the Spirit, and can even affect your ability to have a normal relationship with your future spouse [and I’ll add, current spouse]. If you encounter pornography, turn away from it immediately.” This is excellent counsel. I can’t tell you enough that by not obeying this guideline, it’s probably one of the most powerful things a person can do, young or old, to destroy all of their entire life’s works. It can destroy your family, your marriage, your relationship with your children. Stay away from pornography, but don’t let the pornographers beat us. Just understanding the tricks they play and sometimes implementing solutions can help you get past that. Thank you. |