De-porning your computer is something you may find yourself needing to do at least once or twice. If you're like most other computer geeks out there, your computer probably has at least some porn or evidence of porn on it. Reasons for removing this may be going on a month long vacation with a SO to discover your secret cache, a new roommate who you don't want poking around on your hard drive and finding all your bestiality, or maybe you're going into college and don't want the entire network to leech off of your twenty gig porn stockpile. Whatever the reason, de-porning is a good safe choice to make sure your porn remains out of the hands of the enemy. It should also be noted that this technique with minor variations also works for other things, such as de-Anarchist's Cookbooking your computer.

The first thing you need to decide is what will be done with your porn. While encryption is a viable solution, there are plenty of other nodes dealing with that. This write up is going to concentrate on removing the porn entirely, or at the very least, moving it from network view. So you then need to decide where your porn is going to go. Is it going to be deleted, stuck on CD-Rs, moved to a hard drive that's not shared on the LAN? There's various options to choose, depending on how much of your porn you want to keep, and how much trouble you want to put into hiding it. If you want to keep the stash, and it's not too large, CD-Rs might be a good idea. Just burn all of it to CD and hide the CDs somewhere that only you have access to, like a safe. If the hard drive is only going to be accessible by you, and you know this for a fact, then getting a new hard drive or making a new partition may be in order, unless you already have one that can be removed from shared access on the LAN. This is slightly more risky, as if someone cracks your computer's password, they still have access to it, but for most regular applications, this is a viable alternative. You may also end up wanting to delete the entire thing. This is a much more thorough choice to make, and far more permanent. However, if there is no porn to begin with, there's no porn to discover, right?

Now let's move on to the actual locating/moving/deleting of files. The first thing you're going to want to pick up is a copy of PGP. The latest versions have a rather useful utility that will go that extra step to deleting things. It will actually go back to the sectors on the hard drive that the files you delete took up, and write over them with random bytes, effectively making file recovery very difficult for anyone but the most dedicated snoops. Just remember to do this for every file that you delete, and go the extra step and do it to the whole hard drive once we're done with our purge. The problem lots of people have is that they just have entirely too much porn on their hands. If you don't keep it all in a directory, then finding it all will take a bit of work, but it's nothing too difficult. It's just time consuming to get the job done. Porn generally comes in three varieties: the movie, the picture, and the erotic story. These have rather specific extensions which will narrow the hunt down quite a bit, as shown below.



That should narrow our search down a bit. Run a search (Start/Search/For Files or Folders in Windows) for every one of those extensions listed above. For extra safety, you might want to run a search for all ZIPs and RARs just incase. For now, make a directory somewhere on your hard drive and call it whatever. FOWORJER may work, just spam on the keyboard if you're really uncreative. All of our porn is going to be moved here, not copied here. Once you're sure you've got it all there, either burn it to CD-R, or copy it to a non-shared hard drive or partition. After it's all safely where you want it (or on the chopping block as it is now if you choose to delete it all), it's time to delete. Bring up PGP or a good alternative, and have it delete this FOWORJER directory, overwriting it with random bytes a few times for good measure. Depending on how thorough you make the file wipe, it will make porn recovery rather worthless for anyone willing to try. Go have a drink while it finishes, because this will take a while.

Now we have one last step to do. This will involve going through and erasing any pointers left that we ever looked at porn in the first place. Even if you've ever clicked a NSFW link in IRC before, you probably have some of this sitting around. To start with, clean out all of your temporary internet files, and go ahead and wipe out the history at the same time. Internet Explorer has buttons to erase the history and the cache, but you might want to manually go and check, just to make sure. If you use a different browser, refer to your help file to see where files are stored and how to get rid of them. It's always good to go back and manually make sure the job is done. If you use Kazaa, use that nifty Purge Searches function to purge any searches that you may have made in the past that could be incriminating evidence of your porn usage. One last step if you have Windows is to clear out your Start/Documents menu. In 2000 and XP this can be done by logging in with administrator access, going to "Documents and Settings/{username}/Recent" and deleting everything here. They're only shortcuts, but go ahead and overwrite them with random bytes if you want to. At this point, any evidence that you've ever looked at a single pornographic link should be, more or less, gone. Go ahead and use that nifty overwriting utility to do a full free space wipe. Now all the free space on your computer should be overwritten with random bytes. This again, will take a while, but it's the final step. When it finishes, you should have a totally porn-free computer.

Now that you have a porn free computer, and potentially a few gigs extra, you can move on to bigger and better things. Like.... erm.... more porn?

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