WASHINGTON -- Worried about shady porn sites running up a credit card that you turned over for ostensibly age-verification purposes? Don't worry. Officials at the Federal Trade Commission are doing their best to ensure safe smut-surfing.

At least that's the case if you're visiting one of the five websites covered under a settlement reached Tuesday with Voice Media, a provider of adult websites that has been accused of illegally billing customers' credit cards. The gist of the settlement: "Free 7-day trial" really should mean free. VMI -- which runs adult websites such as cybererotica.com, clubpix.com, xxxpassword.com, ff5.com and the particularly well-named boobtropolis.com -- claimed to offer free trial memberships. But when users typed in their credit card data to sign up for the free trials, VMI allegedly billed their cards for a full $34.95 monthly membership anyway.

Such behavior will not be tolerated, the Feds want porn purveyors to know. Nicholas Franczyk, a staff attorney in the FTC's Midwest regional office who worked on the VMI case, thinks the government should serve as a virtual traffic cop. "I don't want to too strongly draw the analogy of a cop on the beat trying to catch every speeder, you probably can't do that," Franczyk said. "But you hope if they know we're out there and they're being watched, they'll know they can't do certain things."

Apart from the VMI settlement, the FTC is also pursuing a similar case against Crescent Publishing Group of New York, which operates websites such as playgirl.com and highsociety.com. The New York attorney general has accused the company of offering customers supposedly free tours, and then billing them. The FTC claims that the scam has generated at least $188 million. According to a summary of the proposed VMI settlement, which will likely be finalized after a 30-day comment period: "The settlement will bar the defendants from making false or misleading statements -- including misrepresenting whether consumers will be charged for goods or services during a free-trial period -- and will bar billing before providing clear and conspicuous notice of all terms and conditions."

The settlement also bars VMI from changing the terms of their agreements, cancellation or refund policies without first giving consumers the opportunity to cancel their membership. While the agreement between VMI and the FTC does not constitute an admission of guilt on the company's part, the consent order that will be issued by the FTC will carry the force of law. If the company violates the terms of the agreement, it can be fined as much as $11,000 per violation.

If you are suspicious about pornography being downloaded and kept on your computer hard drives by other members of your family, then the time has arrived for you to investigate. Media Detective is just the right tool to help you find out what you need to know.

Media Detective is the perfect pornography remover software package for cleaning porn from your computer's hard drives. Media Detective is a software utility that has been developed to help clean hard drives of offensive files, including pornographic material, undesirable images and movies. Using intelligent image and video scanning techniques, Media Detective can easily scan through the images and movies on your hard disk drives, checking each and identifying those containing nudity through statistical and analytical methods.

Files that then appear to have the characteristics of a pornographic image or movie are shown for user review, so that unwanted items can be cleaned from your disk. Not just a cookie eraser, Media Detective cleans out offensive material that cookie cleaners completely ignore.

There are many tracks eraser programs available which purport to remove pornography. But they only try to remove evidence of activity, and do actually investigate media files to determine if they contain nudity, and allow for their deletion. To actually remove porn the software must do some kind of porn scan and then invoke a porn remover pass to delete files.

The porn eraser functions of Media Detective are required to do a proper PC cleanup; cookie cleaners will not leave your pc cleaner of media files than before. Internet eraser and internet cleanup tools only serve to leave internet history cleaner. Various other hard drive clean up tools only really delete cache entries etc. leaving actual pornography on the computer.

And most hard drive cleanup tools leave the difficult task of effectively scanning for real porn files to software like Media Detective. It is guaranteed to leave your hard drive cleaner, to erase pornography and give the most effective disk cleanup available. No other disk cleaner software can delete pornography and delete porn as effectively.

Cookie eraser tools again only address a part of the problem. Cookie cleaner software will not clean up pornography in the true sense of the word, just signs that it has at some time been viewed. Therefore a computer clean up can only be done effectively by a computer cleaner like media detective. You can use it to safely clean up porn references, clean pornography directories and clean porn files. This will leave you with a clean hard drive and a clean computer.

CLICK HERE for more information, and the free downloadable demo!

Proposals on protection of young people from obscene materials ... ... capabilities in respect of obscene articles on the Internet by, ... requiring Internet service providers to remove or block access to obscene articles. ...

Homosexuality Removed from Classification of Harmful and Obscene ... ... the classification of homosexuality as harmful and obscene from the 1997 Youth ... the blockage of all homosexual content on internet sites in Korea, ...

Obscene Material/Pornography ... But commercial and illegal pornography thrives on the Internet . ... One of the first major studies about pornography on the Internet was by a researcher ...