Quoted from Pintucky:On a serious note. I keep reading all about how the sex perps "download" files of underage kids and police come marching in and take them and their computers away. I'm not as computer savvy as many of you so I am posing a serious question here. I don't know what 'downloading' means (as compared to copying taboo pictures or videos and placing them on your hard drive or in a thumb drive), versus unsolicited web sites popping up without you SEEKING them.
As Ricky Recardo would say, "Let me 'splain . . . ." I use my laptop all day long researching various business sites. I have had (more than just a couple of times!) startling web sites to open up on my screen that had NOTHING to do with my business search, and suddenly I see naked people of all ages doing all sorts of things. In the few seconds of thinking, "Now, how did THAT happen?!", and just before I try to close that web site out, I get a big ole FBI logo and an announcement of something like: "WARNING! YOU HAVE ENTERED A WEB SITE THAT IS ILLEGAL. YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN CORRUPTED AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN NOTIFIED. TO PREVENT FURTHER LEGAL ACTION AND TO UNBLOCK YOUR COMPUTER, YOU NEED TO CALL THIS 800 NUMBER."
First time that happened, I nearly had a stroke! Plus, the web site wouldn't let me close it and it bounced back to naked pictures running like a slide program!!! I finally found a way to get around that site, get out of it, and get my computer running back to normal.
I swear to you, these are totally unsolicited things that have happened to me. I've even had things like this to corrupt my computer so bad that "CRASH", here on Pinside had to come to my house and fix my computer so it would run again.
Now .. . back to my original question.Just because I had a web site of taboo sex stuff (under age perhaps . . . most looked about 18 . . . and it took me about 10 minutes to 'study' the young lady's naked parts to determine her age ) did that constitute a "download"??? I didn't do anything but click a business web site that had NOTHING to do with porn, and I got that stuff whether I liked it or not! Simply because the web site OPENED, did I violate a law? To me, I didn't download ANYTHING! I did figure out that the FBI thing and the 800 number was a scam just to get money from me. I can see how that works because it nearly threw me into an epileptic fit!!!
Some computer whiz please enlighten me on this. I don't wanna go to jail for something I didn't MEAN to do!!!!! Besides, this thing of turning 70 and having my penis "rocket off" is really bumming me down anyway . . . .
Come on Mike, "some computer whiz" is a baited question. Yes you electronically downloaded it, but you didn't have a motive or interact with the computer in such a way that would trigger the download. Anything you see in a web browser, BitTorrent program, FTP client, etc. has been downloaded, even if you didn't save anything to your hard drive. Your ISP can see your browser requested that porn site page, and that's it. They can't determine if the request to open the website was intentional or not. In this case yes, it was an infected advertiser script on a page you were on that takes you on what I call a "redirect trip" where you hit a website with scripted code that simply takes you to another website before you get a chance to close the browser or go back.
The message about the FBI was indeed fake. If the FBI or other criminal investigation agency has a problem with you you will receive a letter in the mail and nothing more. I spoke to a customer at my day job Friday who was trying to access, you guessed it... a business site. He asked me, "How do I get this crap?!" Then I determined he was typing the wrong address and left out an e. Advertisers will buy these fake domains, hoping someone will misspell the URL of a common website. In this case it landed him on a parked site, which is a blank page with some advertiser links provided by the domain host. One of the advertiser scripts was infected with malware which lead him to the fake virus alert page.
https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/06/spam-via-expired-domains.html
An example when you type pinballife.com instead of pinballlife.com which takes you on a redirect trip to an eBay search results page for pinball side mirrors.
