While it's not really worth much debate, Gargoyle may be a little behind the times.

Possibly because of the reputation , especially among self-appointed "enforcers," and partly because "problems affect income," recent surveys of where malware is found have reported that surfing for porn, while not a whole lot more respecatable than Googling for the latest "entertainment gossip," is one of the safer things you can do on the web, as long as you don't give up personal information to get a long term "subscription."

Pornographers don't want the attention that breaking someone's computer brings to their doorstep.

Browsing FaceBook is much more likely to give you a high exposure to malware. In that case it's usually "phishing" types, that invite you to "click here to see this marvelous ... ," so you have to be a bit stupid (not intended as an unfriendly term) to be infected; but if you're browsing randomly at Facebook, or letting unknown people post questionable links on your page, it's pretty likely that ... ... ... you are a little bit stupid (in the opinion of some).

Trading games is arguably the most dangerous of activities common today, since large numbers of "free games" in circulation have the malware embedded in the program in the old fashioned way. Trading games via IRC probably adds to the risk. Downloading lots of "free music" or videos probably follows closely behind gaming as an infection risk.

When large numbers of subscribers get infected with a "redirect" malware scrap, it's common for an internet provider - or for a relay server along your communication path - to block requests to connect to the site. The Yahoo search page may just be their "default" for a blocked or dropped attempt to connect to some site(s); and if they use the same default for multiple blocks they probably can't tell from the symptons that they gave you which problem is causing you to try to go there.

John