Your PC: What's Riskier Than Porn?

One thing is even worse than online pornography when it comes to your
PC's safety and security. Digital music.

Surprised? Searching for digital music is twice as risky to your
computer's safety and security as viewing online pornography, according
to McAfee Inc., a Santa Clara, California-based company that makes
computer-security software. Specifically, just 9 percent of adult sites
are associated with PC-damaging problems such as spyware, adware and
spam, while fully 19 percent of digital music sites will infect your
computer with these.

Why isn't pornography a greater threat to your PC? The business side of
that industry works without extra hustling, reports The Los Angeles
Times. It's much harder to make a buck selling digital music, so it's
more likely there will be unwanted ads--or worse--attached to those
programs. "The tier-one adult sites are doing phenomenally well as
businesses, and because of that they very much have their house in
order," McAfee senior product manager Mark Maxwell told the Times.

The single riskiest search term is for the file-sharing program
"BearShare," since search results so often include intrusive
advertising. Type in "BearShare" into any search engine, and fully 46
percent of the resulting sites are unsafe, according to McAfee's test.

It's also risky to search for celebrities. Britney Spears is more
dangerous than Lindsay Lohan. It's unclear why, but searching for former
couple Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston is 36 percent more hazardous than
searching for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Four percent of all search results link to risky Web sites. Other risky
sites include screen savers and background wallpaper for your computer
monitor. Fully 42 percent of the hits for a search using the word
"screensavers" result in questionable sites, according to McAfee's
study.

There is good news: The very worst sites, which automatically install
key-stroke loggers and other malicious programs--remain small with less
than 1 in 1,000 hitting the top search-engine results in McAfee's test.

What is the safest search engine? That would be AOL. McAfee found that
just 2.9 percent of AOL search results resulted in risky sites, compared
with Yahoo! which had the most at 5.4 percent.

--From the Editors at Netscape

McAfee can say whatever they want. I know that my kids have downloaded
lots and music and listened to alot of it with no problem. My son got
into looking at porn sites and few years back and it totally shut down
the computer.

Again this is mostly only a windows only problem. But thanks for the
homework. Besides thier are many other P2P progs that are 100% better
than bearshare, and you don't have to worry as much like you do with
that one. Ignorant people still use limewire. Real fact, most come from
porn. That's fact. PERIOD. The real fix for everything, quit using a
socicalist republic OS and start using a freedom one.

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What is the safest search engine? That would be AOL. McAfee found that
just 2.9 percent of AOL search results resulted in risky sites, compared
with Yahoo! which had the most at 5.4 percent.
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can you quantify that like that though?

AOL - you got soccer moms searching for recipes
Yahoo - 13 year olds searching for porn/MP3s/whatever else

are you surprised?

Haha PC users.

I download viruses of P2P programs on purpose. Just to make fun of my
Windows-using roommates.