So Chris Langham has been found guilty of downloading child porn...its odd because in lots of ways for me, he has been  humanised by his past comedical history.

Usually I read about this sort of stuff and think to myself - dirty no good piece of shit hang him up by his bollocks and thats it, end of. Yet with thise guy its a little different. Ignoring all of his excuses as to how and why he did what he did, I couldn't help but see it all as a bit of a tragedy. An outright waste of a funny talented mans career and life over what may well have been a momentary descent into madness by a man haunted or deranged by a life once passed.

I still can't get my head around it really. He just doesn't fit the stereotype resident in my head.

I then got thinking about how anyone of us could in theory end up with similar nasty stuff on our PC's and had 'wow, fuck moment'

Did you know that web pages can contain things called iframes and that these can be set to invisible status by the people using them? IFRames are used for all sorts of things from tracking scripts to advertising scripts to general cross site inclusion of content.

Every time you visit a webpage, unless you specify otherwise in your settings,the pages and the images contained within them are downlaoded to your temporary internet files folder. If you are like me and a little lazy then these files could sit around on your puter for weeks or months.

Back to that IFRAME thing. If one of these were in a page of a site you visited, then whatever was on this invisible page would also land up on your pc. What if this page happened to contain nasty porn stuff similar to what Mr Langham had on his PC

Section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988

Under the section 160 of the 1988 Act:

"(1) It is an offence for a person to have any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child in his possession.

(2) Where a person is charged with an offence under ss(1) above, it shall be a defence for him to prove -

(a) that he had a legitimate reason for having the photograph or pseudo-photograph in his possession; or

(b) that he had not himself seen the photograph or pseudo-photograph and did not know, nor had any cause to suspect, it to be indecent; or

(c) that the photograph or pseudo-photograph was sent to him without any prior request made by him or on his behalf and that he did not keep it for an unreasonable time."

This offence is a serious arrestable offence with a maximum imprisonment term not exceeding six months. It has been successfully used in its new form in the recent cases of Sharp and Crumpton.

How many ordinary users would have a clue as to what may have caused the stuff to appear on their puters?

In view of stuff like that then perhaps its a good idea to regulary delete your temporary internet files...you never know what some sick fecker might decide to hide in their pages.

Of course, you can always alter your browser settings to super high and make your browser prompt you for practically every single instance of scripted windows, or disallow iframes and java and flash and movie files and...IOW, make your internet user experiece so amazingly crap that you'll just hate it and will never want to use it again.