Slashdot Mirror
MySpace To Be Made Safer For Users
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad,' the Wall Street Journal reports. The good news: Traffic nearly doubled in the last half of last year. The bad news: MySpace is being criticized for exposing children to risqué content and sexual predators. In response, 'News Corp. plans to appoint a "safety czar" to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information."
Have you seen Myspace? It's the 13 year old whorish girls who are talking about their sex lives and their 13 year old boyfriends who want to be pimps who are the dangerous ones on Myspace. That situation makes it a magnet for sex predators, but Myspace seems to be the catalyst for self-destruction as well as a forum for sex predators to find easy (and willing) targets
Step 6. Ban any and all use of music and video that automatically loads and plays.
While it may seem silly, the dangers explained in the article are reality. Myspace has 56 million users. With all of the personal information I have seen on profiles, it is only expectable that it is misused someday.
A few months ago, a friend of a student at my school experienced a horrible ordeal. Her best friend was murdered and raped by an assaulter who had obtained her personal information from her "Facebook" (another popular--mainly among college students--online community service).
Either way, I find it absurd how much people disclose on their profiles. I won't post any links, but people have their addresses, home phone numbers, and--the perfect appetizer for an attacker--half-dressed pictures. I don't know about you, but that smells like trouble to me.
Seriously, what is a "safety czar" going to accomplish, other than blanketing parents with FUD? The only benefit I can see to this is that it will bring the issue of 'net safety to the forefront again, though the merits of that are questionable, considering the amount of hype these "internet stalkers" get on the local news anyway.
Parents, listen up! Do not let the safety czar be in charge deciding what's right for your kids. The only people who should be making those type of decisions are you, the parents. Think about it: the czar has hundreds of thousands of sites to monitor; you have one (per kid). It's a much easier job for you.
My guitar chord generator.
There's a hysterical clip from the Daily Show about this very topic. Wait for the punch line at the end.
When I read the article title, I thought it was going to be made safer from a technical viewpoint. A little too much freedom is given in page design, resulting in the ultimate stress test for loading images in a single page in FireFox, over-decoration of a web page to the point of unreadability(how do you get a 50% pixel covering OVER an entire web page?), and the possibilities of trojans,etc.
What myspace needs(besides bandwidth) is a "safe mode" where it uses the default CSS layout.
hahahahaha!
/. cliche was replaced. And just in the nick of time, the emperor goes and saves us from tedious repetition.
It's about time the Steve Ballmer chair throwing
Everyone pull together, if you find yourself writing "Steve Ballmer leaned towards the chair, hefted it and....", replace it with "Dick Cheney cocked his shotgun, downed a couple of beers and...."
We can make this cliche work.
My pics.
You don't have to be cruel, you could play with their paranoia like this one. (Note: It's clean, but that's a code generated jpg, so who knowns what Slashdot detection hooks are in there.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My sister has an account, and I created one named "Tom Therapist" (Tom The rapist) to see if she would accept his friend invite. She is 14 and my "character", Tom, was 29. He had no information listed, other than his name and age. She accepted, and she has waaaay too much personal info on her myspace.
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