This reminds me of my first year of college... I was in a double type room that shared a bathroom with another dorm with 2 beds. The guy I actually had to share a room with was just an awful person who represented all of the worst aspects of humanity.

One of the guys across the bathroom divide was never there, so I never really knew him very well, but the other guy was a pretty cool dude. He was really intelligent and laid back, but not arrogant. He knew fucking everything there was to know about nature and trees and stuff, but he was not overly familiar with the workings of computers and stuff.

Several months in to the year, he came to me in crisis mode asking if I could fix his computer because it had somehow acquired viruses... Somehow. I had my suspicions, and the timing seemed about right "Gee, you've been away from your hometown where your girlfriend lives for... How long now?", but I didn't want to pry, so I intentionally avoided finding out if that was the cause of the viruses, I just cleaned the thing out, hunted down some things hiding in the registry and other weird places, and gave it back to him when it was pretty much clear. So fast forward a few days; Oh no! There are more viruses on the computer and it's having a meltdown! Oh nooo! Please help me?!

So I looked at it, and fixed it again, but it was pretty screwed up this time. This happened one more time, and it was basically screwed up to the point where I could have made it Safe for Democracy again, but it wasn't worth either of our time, so I told him his best bet was probably to take it to the student IT department help place and ask them to just wipe the harddrive and reinstall windows on it. I looked it up when I realized just how badly his machine was messed up, and found out that they'll do it for a pittance. Apparently he's not the first one to completely fuck up his computer a few months into the first semester.

I did eventually find evidence of porn though. And by evidence I mean like a list of log files blazing past in some kind of debugging/search process at one point turned up this massive list of URLs which definitely were not baking sites.

I was debating whether I should bring it up, and eventually I did , on the way over to the place to drop his computer off I mentioned that I noticed some internet history which could be related to the sudden onset of viruses, and he got all defensive, "Dude, I do not watch porn. I'm not saying I haven't, I'm saying I don't."

Files and logs are timestamped. That was a lie, but I could hardly blame him, so I was just like "Dude, calm down; I'm not judging you, and seriously man, it's not like I'm going to go tell anyone, but if you want to avoid viruses in the future, for the record, regardless of what you're using the internet for, there's a few basic rules you should know that can help you work out whether any given domain is safe. If you hover over a link, it'll show you where it's going to take you in the lower left corner; if that doesn't match up with where it actually takes you, it's a shady website. Or if it redirects you back to the page when you hit 'back', or if the URL changes without actually changing anything about the site. Also, if you want to download anything, make sure the file extension makes sense; anything .exe is probably bad, and depending on where it's coming from, anything .zip, or really anything you don't immediately recognize."

There were a few other things, but the gist of it was "I'm not going to outright accuse you of fucking up your computer with porn, but if you want to watch porn, I won't judge you, but have some sense and don't screw up your computer."

He seemed immensely relieved that I wasn't going to tell anyone or judge him, which I guess I can understand even though it's a little silly: Why the Hell would I tell our friends or his family about that? That was one of the more entertaining days of the first year of college, and I'm going to assume all was well after that, because his computer issues were never nearly as serious after that.

So the moral of the story is: Browse whatever you want, but be smart about it.