Apparently something which I believed was ‘common sense’ is actually outdated according to many users on Reddit and other sites.
I have thought of saving some images of fetishes and other unusual scenarios on a special folder on my laptop; videos and images for aesthetic use first…:rolleyes:. and then secondly for perhaps ‘sexual activity’.
The thing is, I hear people say ‘dude, why are you saving porn on your hard drive and wasting all that space when you can just stream it!’. I don’t know what they exactly mean despite being a relatively knowledgeable computer guy.
Another thing that I see regularly come up from people opposed to saving porn is ‘I don’t know how anyone can get off the the same material twice’.
Is this true for men (and women) of straightdope? Do you have your own ‘porn stash?’
I personally have never understood why people wouldn’t save some images on their laptop. With a TB of space, what else would people be saving their hard drive space apart from those crappy TV dramas and overly autotuned pop music?
I’m not sure what your level of tech-savviness is but I’m assuming you’re familiar with YouTube where you can watch the videos without downloading them on to your computer.
There are porn sites that work the same way. You can go to them and watch a porn video without downloading it (or paying for it depending on the site).
I’ve heard that these free porn streaming sites are owned by the same people that own pay sites. If you join a pay site, they collect your subscription fee. If you go to a free site, they collect money from the ads.
Anything you need to have access to if you don’t have internet access has to be stored locally. I think it is common to have locally stored files based on perceived need. I have music locally stored for times I don’t have internet connection plus a few movies that I can play on my TV for times when the net is down.
Back in the day of dialup and even early DSL, downloading pictures (porn) took some time so it was likewise needed to have it stored locally to be usable for the purpose, this is no longer the case with always on high speed internet - for most people.
So it comes to the necessity to have them always available beyond the ability of one’s internet connection to deliver them. That and if you have any favorites that you wish to save for any reason. But I would say for most people who have a home internet connection and a cellular internet connection the need for locally stored porn is no longer the thing it used to be.
I’ve archived particular favorites off of the “Tube sites” because producers will issue DMCA Takedown Notices and stuff will disappear. And, as mentioned above, hard drive space is cheap, so why not?
Damn spoiled kids today, with their free internet porn. Back when I was a kid, you had to sneak around your parents’ room, or hope you’d come upon some homeless dude’s stash in the woods. And we LIKED it that way, dammit!
Before saving anything you might want to consider whether you are absolutely certain that every image is legal (ie above age) and you can prove it.
I’m not sure but I suspect that a lot of people you hear of that get busted with kiddie porn on their computer probably just had 50,000 porn images saved, in amongst which there were a handful which featured (unknown to them) somone underage.
It’s strange how porn seems to spontaneously generate in the woods, isn’t it? I mean, if we send an expedition to some previously unexplored, uninhabited section of the Amazon rainforest, without a doubt they’d find a moldy old box of Penthouse issues at a minimum, right?
A decade ago, sure, I had maybe a dozen clips around for a rainy day. Now? What’s the point? Plus I’d rather not keep that kind of stuff saved on my computer.
#1. Many cases of child porn involve children who are young enough that even a blind person could tell that they’re underage.
#2. A significant number of people are caught when a technician works on their computer for some reason, and stumbles across clearly illegal stuff. It’s generally impossible to tell by looking whether somebody is 17 or 18.
#3. It is possible, using certain clothing and makeup, to make an 18-year-old look a few years younger. But the mainstream porn websites make sure that their models are legal age.
#4. Many people who are arrested for child porn have hundreds, and often many thousands, of clearly illegal pictures and videos.
#5. A significant number of child porn cases are found only because the person in question was actively committing illegal activities out in public, such as filming in locker rooms, or taking up-skirt pictures of young girls.
Another large percentage are arrested because they are active members of child pornography groups, who trade pictures back and forth.
I didn’t say this is how all or even most cases occur. That knocks out the relevance of your points #1, #2, #4, #5 and #6. Obviously people get caught as you say, but that doesn’t mean I’m not correct about one way people get caught.
As to #3, there is a lot of amateur porn of dodgy ancestry out there. Mainstream sites are only a fraction of what is available.
I regularly hear of cases where the police are searching someone’s devices for some other reason and then prosecute due to underage images incidentally found. I’m also aware of a surprising number of instances of random searches of incoming passengers by customs officers resulting in prosecution. Is the percentage of intentional paedophiles that high? Or are the authorities often able to find a few somewhat underage images in any large random cache of porn?
This is not a topic on which I’m any kind of authority, and I’d like to hear from someone actually involved in law enforcement in the area.
