Ask HN: Any Solutions to the "Porn Problem"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911665

by jonlegend • 15 years ago

12 18 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have a close friend who claims to be 'addicted' to internet pornography. He has been trying to find software or any service to help prevent access to these types of websites. In his search, he has found that all the one's out on the market are quite easy to bypass and are usually built with a "parent administrator" in mind. He approached me to see if I knew of any software or could build something to prevent his access to porn.

As a hacker (still consider myself a beginner), this is quite a lot to tackle, but I am honestly intrigued by the challenge. Personal views aside, I took a purely technical approach to this. One of the biggest weaknesses with current software is the ease of disabling it, proxy bypassing, and the massive lag it sometimes causes on computers.

Now, despite your views on the issue, I was wondering what creative solutions fellow hackers may have. Is there any way to create a fool-proof anti-porn software or service? Are there any startups that work in this space and are coming up with solutions to this?

willvarfar• 15 years ago

Its not a software issue. The solution is not to self-prescribe a filter, but to self-prescribe alternative (social) activities.

And move the computer to a public place such as hallway, if possible.

o1iver• 15 years ago

If he is not very technical you could just block the top XXX porn sites using his hosts file.

For that to work he obviously shouldn't be able to change the hosts file (or know about it). He also shouldn't know that you could just as simply access the site using the IP instead of the domain...

Edit: you must obviously block all porn sites that he would try for this to work. You could automate that by just blocking the first 400 results google returns for "porn"/"free porn"/whatever.

samarudge• 15 years ago

If you set up his router with OpenDNS, they provide filter categories for porn/adult content etc.

mahrain• 15 years ago

In The Netherlands there are certain "Christian" ISP's that provider Chinese "Great Firewall" type services and customers of the ISP choose them voluntarily. Could your friend use a similar service?

_b8r0• 15 years ago

1. Set DNS to OpenDNS with porn filter on.

2. Watch for attempts to change DNS, then change back.

Not perfect (nothing will be) but should be good enough.

Bear in mind that ultimately if he wants to, he can uninstall the product, get his porn on and put it back on. Maybe charge per install activation?

Having said that, it doesn't sound like his problems are going to be solved by technical measures.

sqrt17• 15 years ago

One slightly un-orthodox solution to that problem is to find a (porn) site that has what you want, get a 1-year subscription, and consciously force yourself to feed your habit exclusively from that one site and never look at any of the other sites again. (This will be easier than it sounds at first, because you have a bowl of paid-for, high-quality content right in front of you).

Most of the addiction behaviour comes from the inconsistent reward schedule that you get when searching for content and sometimes finding some and sometimes not. If you switch this over to a behaviour where, if you feel like it, you look at some content for an hour and then be done with it, you will find that this is not any more addicting than TV or a netflix subscription.

Note that from a cultural/moral standpoint, you may prefer either of the solutions (including getting a filtered DNS connection) - it's really multiple ways to reach the preferred goal (i.e. getting rid of the addiction behaviour) and a matter of taste which one you like best.

An alternative would be to write a proxy that (i) bans all video content outside a handful of whitelisted domains, and (ii) transforms all images outside a handful of whitelisted domains to grayscale.

This will be minimally disruptive to your web browsing experience when it comes to news etc. (since news is just as good when it has only grayscale images) while it should strongly limit the appeal of any primarily visual content.

randomanonymous• 15 years ago

A: Get a girlfriend. B: if he is really that hopeless, enable a child filter on his browser, and just lose the password, to make a re-install of the browser mandatory.

Sounds like he just needs some therapy in the end.

tzs• 15 years ago

Assumption #1: he has an internet connection of his own, using the typical cable/dsl modem => home router => his computer(s) setup.

Assumption #2: there is porn that is not to his taste and he really would prefer not to see.

Fun solution: convince him to give you unsupervised access to his computer and network so you can (you tell him) install filtering software. Tell him you want unsupervised access so that he won't see exactly what you install, so it will be harder for him to disable it.

You then in fact install filtering software on his computer. No doubt he'll find this and easily bypass it. That's OK, because during your unsupervised access you ALSO install custom firmware on his router.

This custom firmware looks for porn, but does not block it. Instead, it randomly replaces a small fraction of the images with images of porn your friend finds disgusting. For instance, if his interest is straight porn with no kinks, get images from some fetish site that features naked fat men defecting on masturbating barely legal boys, or something worse. Go wild here.

This should greatly reduce his interest in porn sites (or greatly broaden his tastes...so I guess there is some risk!).

TobiHeidi• 15 years ago

Consult a therapist

wgx• 15 years ago

Software / Service is just treating the symptoms, not the underlying problem.

ristretto• 15 years ago

Ask "him" to read chapter 4 of "how the brain changes itself". I think deprivation alone will not be a long term solution. It's important to know how this addiction progresses. There are many non-preaching forums about porn addiction. I don't think it's a software problem.

Vitaly• 15 years ago

get a girlfriend.

bradleyland• 15 years ago

Using a software filter to "cure" a porn addiction is like hiding drugs from a heroin addict. It's ineffective, because the addict will just find another way to get their fix, and it doesn't address the underlying problem.

Treatment of addiction is relatively uniform, regardless of the object of addiction. The best advice for your friend would be to seek assistance that isn't technical. There are groups like AA for pornography addiction. Getting past the social stigma will be difficult, but once he's past it, I'd imagine things will get a lot easier.

necenzurat• 15 years ago

bitches? that's kind of expensive

ashraful• 15 years ago

A social sharing service that shares your entire browsing history on facebook (or any social network), would probably help. Or even just sharing you search history.

junto• 15 years ago

I suggest you buy your "close" friend some "sandpaper" gloves, and then tape them to his wrists: http://www.amazon.com/Gloves-Sandpaper-Finish-Wrist-Dozen/dp...

That should put him off... well, hopefully, unless he develops a sandpaper gloves wanking addiction ;-)

talbina• 15 years ago

Does have any children? That cures some, especially having a daughter.

parasitius• 15 years ago

A "close friend"... cummon, its anonymous enough here, just say "me" next time.

DD-WRT is good, set some filters on it and then enter a pass of random text. You'll think twice about all the effort of having to reflash it to get on those sites.

Doesn't work though since the real problem is stimulation addiction. As soon as I avoided porn for a few weeks I was seeking fresh web sites on my hobby (language learning) click click click filling up the same hours and accomplishing nothing productive by never studying anything in depth but just continuing the "hunt".