How to hide the porn...a question.

I'm wondering how to 'hide' the porn that I have on my computer. I only have a couple of movies, not a whole lot, but it took so long to get them downloaded that I'm not real keen to delete them and start all over (and how would I delete them if I got something that was misnamed and I didn't want it?).

I recently bought a CD burner and I really don't want those young guys (usually under the age of eighteen) at the store where I bought it to be able to see that I have it on my computer. If I take it there for the install I'm afraid that that's just what's going to happen.

On the other hand, I have a friend who could install it, but if this happens I still need to hide it because she just would not, and I cannot emphasize this enough, would not understand why I have porn on my computer or why I would even seek it out in the first place (some people, eh? *lol*). The thing is, I know that she will be having a look at the Kazaa program that I use because it's not one that she uses and so her inate curiousity will lead her straight to it and she'll poke around in it, probably do a test d/l, etc., you get the picture. This wouldn't be a problem except for those movies of sweaty naked people having such a good time rubbing their bodies up against each other in a repetitive motion.

This is my dilemma. Can anybody help?

Oh, and I'm running Windows 98SE, if that's important.

Your friend uses Kazaa yet wouldn't understand about you having porn? Hrm..does not compute

Anyway, the easiest way is to create a new directory with an innocent name or move the files to such a place, say "work files", "Granny Thelma's birthday party", or something like that and just bury the directory several levels deep. If you are really paranoid, rename the files themselves and change their extensions (the .avi part) so they can't be opened automatically. Then when you want to watch the movies again, you rename them back to their original names.

Unfortunately, 98 doesnt have built-in encrypting of files if I remember right where you could just password lock the files.

Hope this helps

why hide it at all?
is there some problem with your friends knowing you're a normal, sensual, sexual being?

if they can't handle it or get embarrassed by finding it, then they shouldn't snoop thro your files!

Just hide them somewhere they won't be noticed easily. Rename them something like "UncleJohn'sbirthday01.avi" and put them in a folder called Family Pictures or somesuch (this works better if you actually have some family pictures in the file).

There's only one problem with this really. Namely tyhat you'll never be able to look at Uncle John again without thinking of your porn.

Just put them in a hidden folder. Make a folder and put everything in it. Then go to folder options and choose hidden. Then hide all hidden files in view options.

Hey, thanks everybody!

Wulf: Yeah, can you believe there are still people in existence who don't specifically look for porn on the internet? Go figure. *lol* Thanks for the suggestion. How do I bury it several layers deep? Imagine you're talking to someone who doesn't know a whole lot about computers, other than using one.


warrior queen: I wish. She is definitely old fashioned when it comes to things of an intimate nature. Whereas I would just shrug it off if I were to come across the same thing on someone else's computer, she would have a bit of problem with it. And, agreed!

Star: Thanks for the advice. So, if I rename them, will it still come up as porn to someone who is downloading from me? I wondered about doing that but then what about when people download from me? It seems that the most popular things to d/l is the porn. Whenever I open Kazaa, that's the first thing that people go for. And no, I wouldn't be able to look at Uncle John the same way again! *lol*

pimpslap: How do I put them in a hidden folder? And if I hide it, will I be able to find it again? I have put them all in a folder already, but it's still in the Shared Folder. What else do I do?

If you've got any video games installed on your computer, hide the stuff there. People see EverQuest or Counterstrike and they don't think to investigate. Plus, games tend to have all sorts of sub-folders--SavedGames or Sounds or drlGFX or qNatSporks or SickyFishy or whatever--that you can hide things in. Just... Don't forget where they are. ("Now lessee here... Did I hide it under 'crazyloon' or 'lazycroon'?")

By several layers deep I mean into several "folders" or directory levels. Like say, myphotos/december/xmas/morning/ etc. Watson's idea works, most people aren't going to look deep into the files/folders of a game or say quicken/word/netscape, of course you have to remember where you put the damn things later

The best bet to hide stuff from kazaa tho is to cut/paste the movies out of kazaa (and into another folder etc. like I mentioned) and then put them back into kazaa to share again. For the most part, even if the name is different/not exactly like it originally was people should still be able to get the file from you if you still want to share it. I don't use kazaa myself so I'm not totally familiar with how its sharing works but I think its similar to other programs.

The problem with just making it a "hidden" folder is that its incredibly easy to unhide folders system wide (most windows critical system files are "hidden" to avoid people messing with them). I personally leave hidden files option off since many adware/spyware type sneaky programs install themselves this way and its an easy way to keep track of that stuff.

I don't doubt there are people who don't use the net for porn but yes, I do find it hard to believe people who have kazaa installed don't use it for porn since its so easy. especailly someone who might be too shy etc. in going to an actual video store.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about techies going through your porn unless its something you don't want known I'm sure most have seen worse. I know of one 2nd hand story where a woman had pictures of herself engaged in various acts who wouldn't even come in to pick her machine up or even call back after they offered to UPS it back to her.

I have Win2000 and my drive is formatted in NTFS which lets me create separate accounts for "sensitive" applications and set permissions so that anyone else using my computer cannot open the folders unless they are logged into that particular account.

You just put whatever you want into it before you change the setting to do not show hidden folders. Then when you want to look at them again just go to folder properties and select show all hidden files....

Many good advices have been given in this thread.

If you want to be 100% sure then the suggested methods are not fireproof.

While you can hide the movies in some folders they can still be searched for.

You need to rename the file so it does not reveal it has sex and also change the file extension.

Since the files will take some space on your hard drive then hide them in the games folders as suggested so it looks as they are just part of the game.

The best advice I can give you is not to have the porn physically on your computer at all. Use your CD burner and put it there and make sure no one will ever get their hands on the CD ;-)

I don't hide porn myself (my g/f is cool about it - she likes it too) but I have a lot of computer knowledge.

Hope it helps

Ya... CD Burner!

THen if you get a real collection going there will still be space left on your hard drive

Find another tech

Installing a CD burner isn't very tough, you could probably find someone else to help you.

Someone that is, other than your friend with too much moral fibre.

Maybe if you inquire at the place where you buy the burner they might know somebody who would come over to your house and install it for a few bucks. Then you could stand over them and ensure they don't start poking around in the wrong folders and files

cheers from edm

Wow, thanks everyone. There're lots of great suggestions here and I'm going to file them away for future use. I appreciate all your help. Well, I did finally get the CD burner installed and it wasn't nearly as traumatic as I was afraid it was going to be. My friend did, in fact, do the install for me but I took my tower to her rather than her coming to me. So it was all done without being hooked up at all. Whew!! What a relief. Now I can burn the naughty stuff onto a CD and not worry that someone may accidently comes across it.

I probably shouldn't have been so uptight about it all, but I truly didn't want her to think any less of me. Just because I think looking at porn is an okay thing to do, doesn't mean that everyone does.

Again, thanks so much for all your advice.

? about kazza

Was just surfing through some things here on Lit and came across the ? if hiding things on a pc. I guess I am one of those dumb moms.............my son uses kazza all the time and I thought it was just for him to download music. After reading this thread....imagine my shock and disbelief at knowing my little guy may be watching porn. What can I do to keep this from becoming a habit for him........I want to find a way so that he can no longer go to that site. Can anyone out there help this dumb mom?????? I feel so stupid that I didn't know this. Please, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Re: ? about kazza

Puddin36 said:

Was just surfing through some things here on Lit and came across the ? if hiding things on a pc. I guess I am one of those dumb moms.............my son uses kazza all the time and I thought it was just for him to download music. After reading this thread....imagine my shock and disbelief at knowing my little guy may be watching porn. What can I do to keep this from becoming a habit for him........I want to find a way so that he can no longer go to that site. Can anyone out there help this dumb mom?????? I feel so stupid that I didn't know this. Please, any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Talk to him.

If he's at that age, he's going to get his porn fix one way or another. Even if you disable kazza, he can still sift through the web to find what he likes, or even download a different p2p client, and hide it as suggested for hiding porn (for example, creating a dummy folder in the Program Files directory, and instructing the installer to not place shotcuts on the desktop/system tray, etc...).

Tell him you don't want him d/l pornographic images. It's your computer anyway, and you can restrict his use on it. You have that right at least. If you let him understand the consequences of his actions, he may think twice before clicking away.

BTW, I'm not a parent, but I was a kid stashing porn away when I was younger. So this is just what I think would help.

You can check on them pretty easily too. Just go to Start > Find and search for .jpg, .mpg, .avi, etc... Any suspicious files should clue you in.

I agree with flawed_ethics over there. I was that curious, furtive son not too many years ago (and still feel that way, when my parents walk into my room and I'm surfing this site) and even when my dad discovered it for the first time, I kept looking around. It's going to happen; it's just natural. It's not something you can stop and, honestly, I don't think it SHOULD be stopped.

Obviously, my views may change when I find myself in YOUR shoes in fifteen or twenty years. But we can check in when that time comes. For now, hear me out.

How old IS your "little guy," anyway? If he's like eight or something, I honestly don't think you have much to worry about. Kids are still learning what their bodies can do--hell, their bodies are still GROWING--so the idea that one day a man might stick his, shall we say, his hmmhmm in a woman's haha... Well, it probably isn't that shocking. For all kids know, the last stage of puberty involves growing tentacles. It's only when we start thinking of the opposite gender as different and mysterious (and wonderful) that sex starts having that strong emotional and mental significance. The big deal isn't the physical aspect--it's the level of interface with an object of worship.

...At least, that's MY theory.
</psychology major>

Why do you not want him seeing? If it's because you don't agree with the objectifying of women etc etc etc, I honestly think that's more a function of upbringing than anything else. Not that I'm trying to imply that you didn't raise him well. I'm just saying that... Goddammit, there's some old saying that fits, but I can't remember what it is. Monkey See Monkey Do? That KIND of works. The point is that if he was taught to be respectful to women, he WILL be respectful to women, even if he happens to watch videos of them having sex. If you don't want him to see because you'd like to limit his, ah, intimate knowledge of the process--or don't want him to learn from the likes of Ron Jeremy and Ginger Lynn Allen--well, there are alternate ways to inform him. I was at a cousin's house once, and I found a kid's picture book detailing the process, INCLUDING the man-woman interface that's so often hush-hushed. The pictures were construction-paper cut-outs, kinda like South Park. Only cleaner. And dirtier.

Anyway, I hope some of this rambling helps a little. Best wishes to you and your little guy.

Then again, as sheath would point out, he shouldn't be downloading music either.

I don't know the age of the child mentioned in this thread, but I don't understand the rationale of keeping pornography away from children who have entered puberty. I can understand the desire to keep certain kinds of pornography away from them, but attempting to keep all pornography away from them makes no sense to me.

What is the primary use of pornography? It's primarily used as an aid to masturbation. It has a secondary use as an aid to foreplay, but I would guess it is a distant second. So, is attempting to keep pornography away from adolescents intended as a way to prevent them from masturbating? Or is it merely intended as a way to make their masturbation less pleasurable?

If the goal is the first, I suggest that trying to stop pubescent boys from masturbating is a hopeless task, and cruel. If they are heterosexual, puberty will cause them to be aroused by girls and the thought of girls. Barring castration, this is inborn and inevitable. Upon arousal, assuming they are healthy, they will have erections. Erections aren't something that can be ignored, and it doesn't take long for even the most uninformed boys to figure out the cause and effect relationship between thinking about girls and their penises getting hard.

I was one of those uniformed boys. My parents never talked to me about sex, and the sex "education" in late elementary school was so vague as to be mostly useless. When I started masturbating, I didn't even know that was what I was doing. Mostly at night before I fell asleep, I would lie on my stomach and my penis would get hard as I thought about girls. I hadn't yet even learned to rub it against the mattress or with my hand. I would just lie still. I did this for some time before I had my first orgasm or ejaculation.

The first time I ejaculated, it scared the hell out of me. I was eleven years old. I was lying on my stomach when all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of me. I had no idea what it was, and I was absolutely alarmed. Once I had a chance to examine it, my first thought was that it might be urine, but it was so thick. I then thought I might have diabetes, because I had heard that the disease could make one's urine sticky.

At any rate, I didn't go get my parents, despite my fears. I figured that they would make me explain, in great detail, what I had been doing when this goo came out of me. I hadn't known that I was masturbating, but I did know that I had been thinking about girls, and that the stuff had come out of my penis. Both my penis and girls were embarrassing topics. I decided that I would try to find out for myself what had happened. I eventually calmed down and went back to sleep.

The next day, I started in with a dictionary and the encyclopedia. This was long before the Internet, and they were the only sources of information that I had. From a young age, I was of a scholarly bent, and I liked to look things up for fun, so my reading of the encyclopedia was not an unusual sight. My technique in this case was to start with what I knew (diabetes, urine, penis, etc.) and then use the references in the encyclopedia articles to look up other articles. The dictionary, of course, told me the meanings of new words. It took a while, but over the course of a few days, I more-or-less figured out what was going on.

In the meantime, an experiment was in order. I decided that I needed to attempt to reproduce the phenomenon that had so frightened me. I did everything the same. With my penis hard, I laid on my stomach. I even attempted to think the same thoughts. Eventually, I came for the second time in my life. This time, however, now that I wasn't completely startled, I noticed something important.

I noticed that it felt better than anything I had ever felt before. That was all it took. I was forever after a dedicated masturbator, although I don't recall when I learned the word for what I was doing.

I also collected whatever visual masturbatory aids I could get my hands on. I used magazines, catalogs, advertisements, even comic book characters--anything that featured pictures of pretty girls in various states of undress. It doesn't matter if a brassiere ad is meant to sell underwear; to an adolescent boy, it is functionally pornography. I was particularly fond of the breast-enlargement scams in the back of my mother's Family Circle magazines, for example.

So, one point is, if a boy has hit puberty, he is, with extremely high probability, jerking off. Even profound ignorance is not going to stop him. Someone in authority, by threatening him with damnation, might make him feel guilty enough about it to make him try to stop, but he is going to want to do it, and it will eventually reach a point where all he can think about is sex if he actually does attempt to give masturbation up. Yes, one of the benefits of masturbation is that it allows adolescent males to concentrate on other things, such as homework, for short periods of time.

The other point is that adolescent boys are going to try to accumulate pornography. It helps make them feel profoundly good. Remember, if one defines pornography as information media that help one masturbate, many things will serve as pornography for young men. Societal or parental strictures may inhibit the quality or the quantity of their pornography, but the vast majority of boys will find something. Now that we have the Internet, they can find as much as they want.

In summary, a mother is not going to be able to keep her son innocent. Biology prevents that. In all probability, she is not going to keep him from masturbating. Biology pretty much prevents that, too. In all probability, she is not going to keep him from using whatever visual images he can get his hands on to help himself masturbate. About all she can actually do is attempt to monitor his actions and possessions. Most boys will resent this invasion of privacy and take evasive action. Now, mothers, ask yourself: do you really want your sons to get in the habit of hiding things from you?

Antinomy said:

I don't know the age of the child mentioned in this thread, but I don't understand the rationale of keeping pornography away from children who have entered puberty. I can understand the desire to keep certain kinds of pornography away from them, but attempting to keep all pornography away from them makes no sense to me.

et al

<snip>

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Interesting. And even more so in that it pertains solely to boys. What if this was a daughter one was speaking of? I doubt very many fathers out there would be willing to monitor their young or teenage daughter's porn stash.

(And don't fool yourself into thinking girls aren't into this. Porn, before the internet, used to be almost the sole domain of men. However, now, with the internet, more and more young girls are jumping on that bandwagon.)

SexyChele said:

Interesting. And even more so in that it pertains solely to boys. What if this was a daughter one was speaking of?

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I didn't address girls' use of porn because I don't really know that much about it. If I had a daughter, it certainly wouldn't disturb me.

Etoile said:

Then again, as sheath would point out, he shouldn't be downloading music either.

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Geez, Etoile. Now I'm going to have to debate.

Dammit.



S.

SexyChele said:

(And don't fool yourself into thinking girls aren't into this. Porn, before the internet, used to be almost the sole domain of men. However, now, with the internet, more and more young girls are jumping on that bandwagon.)

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Really? The most extensive porn collection I saw when I was young was in the possession of other girls. Guys had boring stuff like playboy, and stuff. Girls had Sade, pillow books incl Sei Shonagon, Ovid, richard burton translations, scripts of I am curious yellow, a bunch of anonymous old texts and so on. I think the main differences were that as girls we were more interested in the acts of sex, & the feelings than just the visuals of a body

Noor said:

<snip> as girls we were more interested in the acts of sex, & the feelings than just the visuals of a body

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Ha ha yeah...we actually READ the articles!!

SkyyAngel said:

Ha ha yeah...we actually READ the articles!!

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Well, as most of these were non-illustrated books we HAD to read them!