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MySpace Fears, Just Another Backlash?
An anonymous reader writes "Wired takes a hard look at all the hype about MySpace being a danger to teens, and concludes it's just another backlash against technology and youth culture. The most damning evidence against MySpace are the recent cases of men arrested for dating underage girls they met through the site, but statistically these cases are a drop in the bucket. From the article: 'In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.'"
my mom took my radio off me because she thought it was a danger. Of course I was using it to beat on the side of my brother's head at the time.
Tzieg!!!!!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, technology is very rarely the problem. MySpace is by its very nature a social networking tool (of dubious quality, but that's another issue), and is meant to bring people together. What they do after that is a function of the people, not MySpace itself. And yes, sometimes these people meet through MySpace and then have underage sex.
Sometimes people meet each other through school and then have underage sex... I don't hear any claims that school is a "danger to teens". It's time we stopped blaming technology for merely giving people opportunities to show their moral fibre.
My, that was a yummy potato!
Actually there was a digg story saying that most of the 57 million are adbots, fake profiles and inactive users. So maybe the ratio is worse than it looks....
I think they have a quota. At least one station in every market MUST show the viewers/readers a way that the new society is 'bad' at least once a day.
Once a week, they all have to get together and show us the SAME story on some way that we can be kidnapped or killed.
"Dangers lurking in your sink! Details at 11!"
Now...back to the story at hand. Are some kids being fools on MySpace? Sure there are. These same kids would be fools anywhere. MySpace is just one outlet for them.
And we all know the internet is the place where all the creepy and dangerous people are. Watch your TV, it tells you so! Or don't you believe anymore what you see on TV?
Free expression, free opinion, thinking for yourself? What for, when you can have Fox?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...there is always another point of view.
c tid=588
http://www.tshirthell.com/store/product.php?produ
So, the article is comparing a the state of California (a physical region) with MySpace, which is in Cyberspace. To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison. I believe that the comparison to California's crime rate is invalid because cybercrime may or may not involve actual physical contact. And, if it doesn't involve physical contact (for example, a dirty phone conversation), then it may not be reported.
While I realize that some worries of MySpace are overblown, I would like to point out there are dangers. These dangers include the fact that you can easily find out alot of personal information about someone. And, that information is readily available to millions of people on the web.
Should MySpace be banned? No. But, parents should consider doing their job. Note: IMHO, that job should include removing computers from their children's bedroom. The kid should be using a laptop in the kitchen. It won't cure the problem, but it will involve the parents in what their kids are doing on line.
but they sure help!
Stoies like this appear because its good for ratings. Moms everywhere will watch the report because they don't understand MySpace.com and will think their kids are being preyed on. It's a non-isssue for now.
http://religiousfreaks.com/After watching this movie, I have to say that the government crackdown can't come fast enough.
Every time there is new technology, it makes crime easier, and some news guru will always spin an article out of that. Do you know how criminals usually find out that it makes crime easier? They realize the technology makes LIFE easier and just start to apply it to their crimes. Look at cell phones, internet, with emails. These are all used all the time by criminals and new laws have been made because of these technologies, but its not likw the technology is the problem. Just about every step forward for technological progress turns into a step forward for criminals, but the pros just about always will out weight the cons. Just remember that you read the articles with these headlines, so reports will always be there to produce them, stating the hazards of fusion, quantum computers, and Playstation 4.
Back in 1996 when my family got Internet access, dialup access was almost the norm among the middle class families where we lived in coastal North Carolina. We weren't uber-elite, we weren't ahead of the curve by any wide margin. We were like most of our middle class neighbors. My parents at least tried to monitor what I did, and they instilled a healthy fear of revealing my information online because I wasn't an adult and couldn't defend myself against sex offenders.
Fast forward to today. It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures. Parents don't even try to monitor their kids' access by randomly checking on them, reading through their history (rarely worked, but at least our parents tried back then a lot harder than most today). Many, many parents today just don't want to be bothered. It's not their fault that junior is living a completely parent-free life the moment he goes online. Oh no. Parents can't be expected to be the boss in their own homes!
I've said it once, I'll say it again. Too many parents today regard the Internet as Happy Playland(tm) and don't even bother trying to protect their kids today. Then again, maybe this is necessary because too many of my peers in college had a dreadfully naive view of basic security. It's about being a responsible parent. When you had that child, you took on the responsibility of being a parent. That means you sacrifice personal time and career where necessary to raise them. I'm sick of people who insist that they can have it all, while they do half-assed jobs as parents in the name of finding "personal fullfillment" through everything but being a good parent raising a new generation worthy of those who made this country great.
myspace is really a dangerous place. it's time for parents to start doing something about it!
you can start by forwarding this message (take out the FWD) to as many concerned parents as you can. if enough parents forward this email, the government will shut myspace.com down.
-- lol pwned
"Can someone tell me how to unblock myspace at my school?"
That's what so many kids are trying to do at school, I'm glad they blocked it, should be learning. I always laughed at the kids that played games on their TI-85 calcs but couldn't figure out how to graph a simple parabola.
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
The problem with myspace, and the internet in general, is that it leaves a record of these kids actions (I am talking about 14-21 year olds as "kids").
You see, before the parents didn't know little susie was blowing little billy behind the gym, now they can read about it and their scared. Or they (the parents) didn't know that their kids know about pot, sex, curse words, even politics to some extent, and they know the kids didn't learn it from them (the parents).
So where did little Susie/Billy learn about premarital sex and drugs and drinking and etc... Tv? no, School? no, Home? Hell no! They must have learned it from MySpace and Yahoo Chatrooms and Eminem.
It's not that kids talk about sex nowadays, and it's not that little girls and boys act like little whores and quasi-pimps, it is that these kids put it out there... for all to see, including their parents.
It is a drop in the bucket, but people who've never heard of MySpace before don't know this. It's the same thing that happened when the internet was just entering the popular culture. People didn't realize how widespread it already was, so when they heard the horror stories, they thought it was the rule rather than the exception.
I, for one, welcome Tom as my new overlord.
from TFA (again):
'In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.'
It's interesting that this line jumped out to the poster, but it did for me for waaaaaaaaay different reasons: my first thought was, "who's the myopic statistician???" This FACT proves nothing about the safety of MySpace versus deviant California behavior...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
No, it's not just another backlash. It's another backlash with background midi music and 30 animated gifs.
You children are going to use foul language, take drugs, and make whoopie. And there's nothing you can do about it...
//and if you really didn't, karma will make sure it doubles back twice on them.
Because you did the same thing when you were their age.
On top of people externalizing their poor parenting on places like myspace, it seems the wonderful government schools are also using it to spy on their students. Last month here in the town of Athens Georgia several students were suspended and/or expelled for their blog contents. While one student had said something something to the effect of "i wanna fucking kill her sometimes" and was expelled from the school system for such (student had straight a's and was being put in advanced classes) others were suspended for other content like insulting language towards the teacher, the school policy on , or wearing shirts with slogans that supported the expelled student, all whole the only thing to have taken place on school gounds was the shirt thing. Just chalk up another reason not to send your kids to government school i guess.
It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy - Steve Jobs
Comedian Demetri Martin did a hilarious exposé on MySpace on The Daily Show recently, which tends to reflect some of this backlash.
(Google video had it for awhile, but it's disappeared from there. Thank you, YouTube!)
does anyone just think it is "coincidence" myspace has been all over the news seemingly since News Corp has purchased them? I never say anything related to myspace before the deal. Now, there are nightly segments on myspace it seems...
Myspace abuses me every time I log on ... and I'm just talking about the page design.
Definitely bad math. Whoever made the comparison is just plain foolish.
How can anyone compare 33 million physically existing people with 57 million registered accounts in a digital database? Furthermore how do you compare an online "community" with a the state of california?
What is myspace anyways? ... :-/ -- not hip I guess. I'm old fashioned in my desire for FACE to FACE conversations and journalling IMPORTANT aspects of my life (not all of it)...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
i don't worry about kids losing their innocence on myspace... i just worry they'll learn poor design skills and bad programming principles, and will simply stop working every 20 minutes or so. that can't be productive for a future economy that has to be built on a service-based, technology-dependent workforce!
The most damning evidence against MySpace are the recent cases of men arrested for dating underage girls they met through the site
Since when it is illegal to simply date underage girls? I realize it would offend a lot of people, but is it actually generally considered a crime in the US?
This has all become far to silly. Those responsible for teenage stupidity online have been sacked.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I haven't gotten 1 date from myspace... then again I'm not a 17 year old girl.
I live in Baltimore County. We just had a arrest of a man who went out on a date with a woman from myspace where he killed her on the date.
Doesn't seem to be far fetched here. Usually, like all of you, think it's being hyped to generate news. But in this case it is very, very real. Just ask her family.
I think she was 27 and he was 22, or something like that. So it's not just a risk for the young ones.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures.
Indeed. I'm often amazed that so many people seem to refuse to accept the existance of exhibitionists.
Sluts and teases often are exhibitionists. They enjoy having people drool at them. Some use "mooning" as a socially aceptable outlet for their desire to show their ass to people, and now there's the joy of webcams, where they can, from the security of their own room, show their nubile bodies to countless strangers.
Off course, there are laws against exhibitionism (especially for those under an arbitrary age), as there are laws against oral sex (in some places), but when has it ever been enough to tell teenagers not to do something they want to do? That usually makes them want to do it more just for the joy of rebelling.
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.myspace.com/johnbstalkingyouonmyspace
I thought this was great for this topic, have a laugh.
The song sums up the truth about myspace...
I guess what I am saying is that while there is no substitution for parental monitoring in the real and 'Net worlds, I don't have to worry about sexual predators from all across the country coming to the local mall to target my kids and remainining undetected, I DO have to worry about the uses of technology by those same predators to lead them right to my doorstep.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
That's a curiously benign way of putting it.
http://www.perverted-justice.com/
I wouldn't worry too much. I don't think myspace will be around for the longterm.
I had never had a myspace account until quite recently. Once I got the account going. The following things jumped out at me RIGHT AWAY.
1. The web design for the user space is GOD AWFUL ugly
2. It's hard to find stuff, it's NOT intuitive
3. myspace seems filled with bogus account (ads for women who want you to sign up for their porn video)
4. It's Sloooooooow
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I don't know about that!
<looking up nervously>
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
but some people are to stupid to see the whole picture. So, this time they're looking at MySpace and see danger. Some day they'll be looking at you.
This misses the point: MySpace has numerous "polls" and other crap that asks kids questions which destroy their privacy. Kids being kids don't see the danger in having a permanent public record about themselves and routinely answer questions like whether or not they drink, do drugs and have sex. Coupled with the ease in which they disclose their age, where they live and where they go to school, kids disclose all sorts of information online they shouldn't and make it easy to tie the myspace account to an actual human.
This isn't limited to MySpace, but MySpace asks the questions and prompts kids to reveal this information.
I also don't question whether or not schools have the right to block MySpace at the firewall, they do and should do so if they deem it isn't of educational value. Computers and the 'net are in school to support curriculum, not to meet your buddies online and chat with.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
No need to dance around the point. Why don't we all just admit that we hate the myspacer's and if they are dumb enough to get themselves raped or killed becuase they post oodles of personal information on the site, then good riddance.
That is what most of us are thinking isn't it?
<\NaturalSelection>
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.
Gee, that's comforting. Joseph Stalin is quoted as saying: One death is a tradgedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but that's nearly 750 cases a year. What if you were the parent of a child involved in one of those cases? Those numbers seem really small when compared to the 33 million, but they are 750 people that have had a life altering experience (that they were more than likely not ready for) at the hands of someone else. Why don't we take a stand on that? How can we reduce something tragic like that to just a statistic?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
There's one greasemonkey script that removes the embed(imbed?) tag as well as iframe from profiles.
Sadly, this also removes the text entry window(bloggers, forums, etc) but you can disable on the fly. The important part is that it removes embedded music videos. Who thought it would be a great idea to embed music videos that auto-play upon visiting your profile?
A few more greasemonkey scripts to install, and suddenly myspace is much easier to surf.
If parents want to get involved with their teens on myspace, how about teaching them not to post risque' images of themselves on their profile? Teach them some self-respect and dignity.
If people would do a search for registered sex offenders in their area, then they might have something to worry about (its usually far higher than most would expect). Myspace is just another scapegoat for unacceptable social behavior.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Dangerous as far as the law goes as well.
Teenager arrested because of photo on myspace showing him holding handguns
They've charged him with three counts of juvenile possession of a handgun.
This has happened before with pictures showing teenagers drinking or using/possessing illegal drugs.
However, depending on how he got ahold of the handguns, his holding them was perfectly legal in Colorado. All that would be required would be his parent's permission.
I don't read AC A human right
I may go down in a ball of flames for this but...
/. so you know this ain't real).
I honestly believe statutory rape is not real rape. It's all religious dogma masked by political posturing. Let's say I'm 21 and married to a 16 year old. Yep, that's legal in most of Europe. And we're having sex too (this is
We fly out to the states for our honeymoon and bam I can be locked up for 5 years.
WTF?
Do girls really only become women in the US at 18 but in most of Europe at 16? 14 in the Netherlands?
Or is there an element of prudishness mixed with a lack of political will to look soft on anything with 'rape' in the title.
Real rape is a horrific deprivation of a woman's right to choose and consent to an intimate act. Statutory rape is a politician telling a woman she has no right to consent.
62 cases of statutory rape per month in California says more about a need to change the age of consent than it does the presence of predatory adults.
-Nano.
The HR community is showing it as yet another work time related use of the internet. http://www.hrhero.com/audio/blog/?K793A
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I'm sick to holy hell of the series of urban legends perpetuated through myspace. All the kids who didn't go through the FWD: FWD: FWD: BILL GATES TO GIVE 100$ for 1000 forwards> THIS COULD WORK, GUYS! days of email are now interested in the internet through Myspace, and forward all sorts of hoaxes. C'mon people, Bonsai Kitten? "Progesterex the sterilization date-rape drug"?!
At least with email, when I responded to a thread about a hoax the person became so offended that they stopped forwarding me the urban legends they sent to everyone else. I'm not so lucky when it comes to retarded bulletins.
Parents need to get on the ball and start doing something about their kids. You know, things like teaching your daughters: Don't meet up with MEN you don't know. Don't go off with MEN you meet ONLINE using sexually provocative pictures of yourself. Don't fucking put provocative pics up period. It's obvious these girls parents haven't taught them shit and would rather not do their jobs as PARENTS, the first and foremost of their responsibilities in life.
You can't just pass this off, I have known alot of people who started getting out and fucking alot of people way before their time, and alot of them regret it, saying they were stupid kids. Now sure there are the few out there who don't give a damn, and just keep on enjoying themselves, but If a parent is allowed to choose where a kid is going to live, what a kid is going to eat, and many other factors of their life, most of us would rather our kid not be fucking some guy who is just out to fuck a girl with tiny tits. There are the few cases where the guy isn't just out to fuck, but these are few and far between.
In theory that makes anywhere where underage teens and adults meet a possibly unsafe enviroment because it could lead to them dating.
When I was in high school I knew plenty of girls that were dating older guys and a couple guys that were dating older women. When I graduated I knew a couple guys that were dating freshmen and from what I hear there are people that I graduated with who still haven't "moved on from high school.
So the internet certainly isn't needed for this. I'd be far more concerned about all the teenagers that freely give out their cell phone numbers whether it be on their away messages, their websites, or their journals. I think that be a far greater concern if I was a parent.
Go to my space. Click on Classifieds. Click on Personals (all). Read the titles of the posts. The first one I see is "well hung 4 your pleasure". Keep in mind I have not at any point entered in a login (I dont have one at Myspace) or agreed to any terms whatsoever that I am over 18. How does myspace know how old I am? (hint: they dont).
Believe me I am no prude, but I have 3 daughters, one of which is old enough to start going to various sites, mostly forums for YA scifi/fantasy books she is reading. We use the parental controls under OSX and she isnt allowed to surf without an adult knowing she's on and where she goes. We do our part in accepting responsiblity for our kids and what they see online.
Where this breaks down is when legit sites start using myspace, and encouraging their young adult visitors to go to myspace.com.
Example: Maximum Ride, a young adult book by James Patterson, has a message board she is a member of. One day they announced that they had a Myspace space (I guess their own website and forums werent enough?), and encouraged their young adult visitors to come to myspace and check it out.
Needless to say, I wonder how many YA visitors to maximum ride's site went over to myspace? I wonder how much of what I describe in the first paragraph they saw by accident? I pointed all this out to the maximum ride site admin, but they blew me off, citing (as this post suggests) that the bad press about myspace was just 'backlash'. Thats BS.
I say if something smells like a sewer, and looks like a sewer, call it a sewer. I have no issues with sites that exist for consenting adults to do or see whatever they like, as long as they enforce their own privacy policies and age limits, which myspace does NOT.
People are getting away with murder from myspace as well. I wouldn't want my teenage daughter on there, outside of the fact how many rampent viruses are on some of those pages, among other things:
g elin/2006/02/28/188049.html
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/rebeccaha
From the article:
"In February, a 14-year-old New Jersey girl was found dead in a dumpster after arranging a meeting with a stranger on MySpace.
- A 15-year-old California girl was abducted in December and found murdered in January. Her MySpace page included personal contact information and lots of activity.
- Hartford, Connecticut officials are investigating eight sexual assault cases after teenage girls met men on MySpace.
- In Lafayette, Louisiana four teen girls were sexually assaulted by a local pervert who found them on MySpace.
- In another Louisiana case a predator lay in wait for a teen girl in the parking lot of her place of employment, which he had found on her profile page."
I'd just like to agree with your comment. I wish more parents would take up the white-list approach until the deem their child mature enough to deal with the consequences of their own actions. You can't blame technology for a social problem, perhaps for exacerbating it, but not for the problem itself.
That's being said I'm less than 10 years removed from being a teen and I recall how hard it really felt to be that age. The internet was a great thing for me because it was one of the few places I could access that was unstructured. I was a cleaver kid, and certainly more cleaver than my parents with a new technology in our house. But I think they used good judgment to set up a series of rules that worked to keep me safe and relatively unrestricted.
First they kept the computer in a common room, in our case it was the entertainment room in the basement where people other than myself were frequently present.
They educated me on what they felt were good morals and general security practices. Basically telling me what was acceptable for me to view and do. Why would I give out my information to someone I don't know on the internet if I wouldn't do the same to a person I don't know on the street?
They would check in on me to see what I was up to fairly often.
And they would put restrictions on the time I was able to use the computer. (It helped that we had dial-up and only one phone line, I was only able to tie up the line during certain hours).
As I grew older and became financially responsible enough to earn and save enough money for my own PC my parents allowed me to do so and keep it in my room. I still had all the foundation they had set for me and things worked out pretty well.
Once again, let's be clear about something:
If we REALLY wanted to protect children from abuse, sexual or otherwise, we'd take them away from their families. Statistically, this "predator" nonsense is practically a non-issue. The vast majority of abuse comes from a parent, relative, or trusted friend. No Internet needed for that to happen, either.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
perhaps they should concentrate on solving that before pointing fingers
89110 rapes Per year in USA #1 in the world overall! (p/c USA is 9th)
Sometimes people meet each other through school and then have underage sex... I don't hear any claims that school is a "danger to teens". It's time we stopped blaming technology for merely giving people opportunities to show their moral fibre.
School is a danger to teens! There, you see? I claimed it. But seriously, many professionals in the area of education have said, after many years in the secondary ed industry, that school is in fact a real danger to growing minds' ability to develop critical thinking skills; it is almost as if those of us that possess them do so despite school rather than because of it.
For specific such professionals, I would refer you to John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, and perhaps Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Both are well respected educators who think that schools on the whole are, in the words of Jon Stewart, 'Hurting America'.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
And why wasn't I counted in the California number? Sure, it's not my state of residence. But I did spend two days there in July, 2000. That's a lot more time than I've spent on myspace, where I'm counted.
Do give your child their own computer. Place the computer in a "public" room in the house like the living room, dining room, open office. Set up your router to not allow access to the internet after 10:00 pm (or earlier). Parents have to get involved in their child's computer usage.
Remember this is an ad-supported site. So for (1), the design features ads prominently and that's what really counts for the real customers. You won't get implosion from (2) or (4) because the site appeals to teens with too much time on your hands. You seem to assume in (3) that these bogus accounts won't draw eyeballs to myspace. By pushing the suggestiveness of the site to the limit that won't be blocked by parental filters, these bogus accounts make myspace even more appealing to young boys.
That's a guess based on adult rape statistics, where most attackers know their victim.
Good guess: Based on the US Dept of Justice figures, roughly one out of seven cases involves a stranger. Whereas this frequency is greater than I would have expected, bear in mind that many (most?) crimes are crimes of opportunity.
Aside: I'm raising a little girl. I've perused the list of 'registered offenders' in my area. These lists are nigh useless; they don't indicate who is a threat to strangers and who is a threat to his children. I've decided that I have more important things to worry about than my family being attacked by a stranger.
MYSPACE shouldnt even been listed in tfa. I remember my VERY FIRST day on the net.. Dialup... Sitting in my dark room, staring at the YAHOO search engine trying to think of something other than titties, ass, and other keywords that come to mind. Where were my parents? Having Punch & Pie downstairs with friends...
Dont blame technology, isps,blogs etc etc... Dont load up a "keyword filter" and release your kids on the net...
Wake Up. The net can be a wonderful tool... And ofcourse it can be a source of corruption. (Kids/yound teens) love the corruption....
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million. Yeah, really arguably. Slashdot posting statistics interpreted by Wired is s like having your Mother help your Grandmother get DSL working. Okay, right off the bat: you can't be only part of the MySpace community, so your risk from your real community is implicit in your risk as a member of MySpace. Second, I have absolutely zero confidence in MySpace tracking the sexual assaults of its members...that's simply not their job. Conversely, it's not the job of the people who keep statistics in the real world to figure out whether the members were on MySpace, unless MySpace was involved in the assault.
Some quickies:
MySpace users are a subset of computer users. Computer users are disproportionately male (especially the teenage segment). Males are far less likely to be victims of statutory rape. Males are also far less likely to report cases of statutory rape (duh).
Anything that increases contact with other people increases the risk of bad things happening. The question is whether it is a good tradeoff; is the increased risk balanced by some benefit? I think that in most cases, with a little common sense caution and some perfunctory parental supervision, MySpace is a great deal. Wired is asking the wrong questions, and coming up with the wrong answers. But you can't really blame them; people in this country are only willing to make zero risk propositions these days.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
However, there is a great alternative site out there called Montspace. They actively work against users who have hidden agendas and protect kids against predators. I've never heard anything bad happen on Montspace so they must be doing something right. All my friends have Montspaces now.
The guy who created it is an advocate for online safety, his name is John Montelongo, hence the name Montspace.
You can look at my Montspace (shameless plug hehe) over here.
- A 36-year-old computer geek turned suicidal after having his posts dumbed down. His last post was a highly relative and thoughful comment that was bashed by extreme Slashdot right wingers.
- Bumblefuck, Georgia, officials are investigating eight sexual assault cases after teenage girls posted comments to Slashdot about how sexy Linux was and they ran only Ubuntu and ran only on a shellprompt.
- In Gary, Indiania four teen boyss were sexually assaulted and had their computer equipment stolen by a local Slashdot regular "white hat hacker sleuth" who found them by tracing thier IPs when they repeatedly smurfed on Slashdot.
- In another Louisiana case a Slashdot predator lay in wait for a teen girl in the parking lot of her favorite local mom and pop computer store, which he had found on her Slashdot profile page. He blugeoned her to death with a copy of Windows Vistas. Authorities reported this was not the first time Windows had killed a user. Other cases such as a local man slashed with knives and wity repartee by "Slashdot slashers" and a copy of OS/2 was left on his bleeding corps as a message to the community, that if you weren't open source you weren't kosher
I think you have goth confused with emo. Goths can be obsessed with blood and gore but they are generally not self-destructive people.
Crime (rape, whatever) is the least of concerns in my opinion. It is the public record of these kids lives that will get them in trouble. Let's face it, teenagers are arrogant when it comes to knowing what is right and wrong. They want to freely express themselves but don't realize that later in life, those thoughts and opinions may very well bite them in the ass. Those thoughts and opinions that they no longer agree with. We all know employers readily search the internet for prospective employee names. If some immature, ignorant (note I don't say dumb) 16 year old gets on there and reveals his real name or pictures, that CAN be used against him. It would show a lack of character for which many of us have but don't show it.
That's exactly what concerns me as well. I've read profiles of kids that my kids know and some of them are smart enough not to post risque pictures of themselves and know some of the basics of online safety (one 14 or 15yo girl posing in a bikini top, holding a condom, and winking aside). Yes, they cuss, gossip, and talk about sex - I know they do that everywhere else as well. The profiles and surveys, though, tend to give away a lot of information.
As I told my daughter, even if you don't post your pictures or reveal info about yourself intentionally, there are lots of ways to piece together info.
I said, "What if your picture isn't online, but you post that you're meeting Brittany, Lindsey, and Paris (not their real names) at the food court on Friday night. Their profiles are linked, they've posted pictures of themselves and you, and you've all answered the questionnaires on your likes and dislikes. Then Friday, some guy comes up and says he's Nicole's (who isn't there) cousin and he's a big fan of so-and-so and really loves the same movies you do and know's all of your names. Can you see that this could potentially be a scary situation? Here's a guy in real life who acts like he knows you and knows more about you than a stranger possibly should and you know nothing about him. What is he asked y'all to leave to mall to go meet Nicole and some of your other friends?"
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
do me a favore... forget about myspace.
This whole Myspace thing has all the makings of a good ol' modern American Witch Hunt...
What triggers the witch hunt these days is not people getting very bad trips from eating rotten bread, which triggered the witch hunts of old, instead today it's any unsupervised gathering of teenagers where they might come into contact with adults unsupervised.
The elements of a witch hunt are:
(replace "person being accused of being a witch" with "MySpace" and replace "Witch" with "Haven for child predators" for the modern version):
A. Defending the person accused of being a witch is considered proof, in the eyes of the accusers that the defender has sympathy for witches or is one too.
B. Almost any evidence can be used to show the person accused of being a witch has a witch's supernatural power, from a funny walk, to an "evil eye"
C. In the rare instance when a person is aquitted of being a witch, allegations of being a witch anyway will forever blacklist the person from most aspects of society.
D. The test for not the person not being a witch is fatal and/or ridiculously humiliating.
E. Being accussed of being a witch is almost as bad as being convicted of being one
F. The witch's accusers always want the most horrible punishment imaginable for the witch they can think of regardless if it fit the alleged crime or not.
The internet gives teenagers like these one more place to demonstrate their lack of maturity, and can amplify the consequences. So yeah, parents need to be concerned about it. But it's not the internet per se that's the problem; it's kids learning to be adults. What kids (and most adults) need to realize is that the Internet is one big bulletin board. You wouldn't paste pictures of you drinking on the school bulletin board. You wouldn't write a newsletter for free distribution to the public about your sex life. And yet, people do just this kind of thing with these weblog accounts. Heck, I know I've been guilty of it before, posting without realizing that I was not anonymous, that my parents, employers, and potential future employers can read it.
The school was way out of line with that suspension and alternative education program too. 10 days of suspension and permanent resignation to retread classes for a non-violent prank that really didn't hurt anyone except maybe their egos? It's not like this kid was posted death threat lists or even insinuating that the principal was up to illegal or immoral doings. He just said repeatedly that the principal was fat. IMO, this is part and parcel of this whole trend of labeling the typical behaviour of children and teenagers as abnormal and therefore not socially acceptable. Anybody else remember the days when getting into a schoolyard fight meant staying after school for a single day, not getting kicked out? And what the heck is with parents putting their kids on drugs for being rambunctious?
As for the demonization of MySpace over the cases of statutory rape, I see it as being very similar to the recent church sex scandals. You're more likely to be sexually abused by your elementary school teacher than you are your priest and even more likely to be sexually abused by your parents. Still, people want to be able to reduce the problem to a single factor, so you find a factor and you demonize it, stating that it is the problem, not just a single factor. This is human nature. Meh.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
"but statistically these cases are a drop in the bucket."
If there is a one in a billion chance that my daughter could be attacked, the drop is bigger than the bucket.
MySpace has NoPlace in MyLife.
And this comment right here shows the real danger of kids going online, the fall of modern grammar and spelling. Do you really want your kid to sound like this?
And moyameehaa, maybe you're not a native English speaker. If so, I'm sorry that I had to use you as an example for this satire. If not... you should hang your head in shame, man.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The problem with MySpace isn't the murder-factor. People love hearing stories about some kid got killed from "viewing a website" (because that's all it is, to them) - then they can proudly say that their lives don't involve that dangerous Inter Net. Ignorant people will cling to any bad facet of something they don't understand as proof that they are right. MySpace's problem is how many young kids are using it, and are learning that being cool means collecting friends. And to be really cool, you should collect prostitutes and porn stars as friends too! Why doesn't the news pick up on that? Anyone who's been to an elementary/jr. high school has heard just how popular MySpace is...but try reporting a statistic when there's murder a'foot.
Think of it this way. I'm not the greatest fisherman because I don't know how to find the right spots, the bait to use, etc. for most kinds of fishing. So my success rate is low. Good fishermen/women know the exact times, baits, and places to achieve the highest hit rate in terms of catching fish.
Online predators, like fish predators (the fishermen/women in this second analogy) know exactly what they are doing to achieve the highest hit rate on their desired victims.
Hanging around the mall trolling for victim gets a person noticed. Hanging around trolling online is easy and invisible because the predator can simply pose as another "teen", etc. and gives the predator the chance to remain undetected until the last minute. Only we're not talking "game wardens" and fish, we're talking about children's lives being ruined when a predator slips through the cracks and reaches a victim
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Outstanding observation!
MOD PARENT UP!!!
I think, from listening to my two teenage daughters, that "date" and "sex" are close to synonymous. They tend to be more precise than us old guys. "I'm going to Starbucks with ..." or "a movie" or whatever is what they say when we would have said "I have a date with ..." and meant we were going to a movie or a restaurant or whatever.
They say, "Daaaaad! We're not dating. Yuk!"
(Of course, like geeky me could get a "date" back then.)
...dangerous minorities do!
Need help - license plate reverse lookup. NY plate CSE-2960. Guy almost hit me, blamed me, pissed me off.
this point however is balanced by the fact that in the local mall your predator can hide in the parking garage or a secluded area and forcibly snatch your kid unnoticed. in the online realm they must work harder to obtain a consentual meeting.
thus the difficulty remains the same, though from different causes.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Teens are doing this on the internet, in part, because there are fewer public places they can claim as their own, and safety-conscious parents are more reluctant than past generations to let their kids go out into a real world unsupervised.
While I couldn't agree more with those who are saying it is time for parents to be parents, I also see society fighting a loosing battle with psychology on this one. To quote Robert Kegan, Teenagers are firmly in his third order of consciousness: "Socialized (identity bound up in roles and relationships, no fully differentiated self yet)." For those of you not bound up in the post-modern social science revolution, this means teenagers for their identity by being with other people.
My advice to parents (not being one myself): If you don't like how your child is interacting socially don't just cut them off, help them find good places to be social.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Do girls really only become women in the US at 18 but in most of Europe at 16? 14 in the Netherlands?
In the US, age of consent is left up to the individual states, and it varies from state to state. It's rarely set as high as 18. Most states have it at 16, actually, some have it at 17. A few have it as low as 14.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
CEO DeWolfe is careful not to dismiss parents' safety concerns, and he says the company has plans to hire a full safety director -- "somebody to think about safety and security 24 hours a day, seven days a week"
The dude won't think well if you don't let him sleep.
A microsoftie named Linda Criddle had some level-headed MySpace safety advice. It was so good I couldn't add much value to it in my security newsletter for non-technical people, except to attempt a teen-compatible explanation of why posting sexy pictures is a bad idea.
Moderators, please notice cmpalmer's comment, sibling to this one, and please moderate it appropriately (meaning, up).
Some certain-to-be-controversial thoughts extending these...
Fast forward to today. It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures.
Err...how do you know that teens didn't tease people (including those of their own age -- I don't see why it need be someone older) before the Internet?
I mean, people do not suddenly say "Gosh, sexuality! Never noticed that before!" on their eighteenth birthday.
It's not their fault that junior is living a completely parent-free life the moment he goes online. Oh no. Parents can't be expected to be the boss in their own homes!
What I don't understand is why it's not possible to talk things over with them. The problem is that sex is a hidden-yet-fun thing, you know? I don't think that blocking what they are doing or spying on them (and this is not Internet-specific) is nearly as important as being in touch with them. I mean, you trust yourself to use the Internet, yes? What do you have that they don't? Knowledge? Fine, impart it to them. My parents were always honest with me and I never felt a hesitation about discussing anything at all with them, and I valued that incredibly highly. Instead of simply forbidding me to do something, they explained *why* they felt that I shouldn't and let me come to the same conclusion. That respect meant that I never hit a rebellious stage.
If you don't think that your kids should be using MySpace, explain *why* you feel that way to them. If you really have a good reason, then you should be able to convince them. Don't just say "If I ever catch you on MySpace, I'll ground you." That just says "If you want to expand out of swaddling clothes, you need to learn to go behind my back", which is not, IMHO, a good thing.
I frequently see articles about how censorship of videogames is a bad thing, and how "parents are the problem" -- but that usually seems to take the form of "parents aren't personally blocking what their kids watch". I don't think that censorship is a good approach. If your kid wants to read a book containing a description of people having sex, they are going to do so. The question is whether it's going to be in your sight, with guidance or behind your back and pissed off at you. I'd be more concerned that you encourage them to do what you consider right and explain why.
Same thing with drugs, and so forth. You must have a good reason for not doing drugs, so instead of just threatening them, just explain why, you know?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So how do you grow a social networking site? First, you set the terms of service to limit users to those 16 years or older...then you overtly encourage younger (much younger) users to violate those very terms OPENLY and easily detectably (word?)... So why are there 15-20 million 12 to 13 year olds with MySpace sites (and their public profiles clearly reveal this by revealing both what school and what GRADE they are actually in!?!?!?!? Because it's all about the money. The MySpace folks are sick.
It's like letting your 8 yr old kid loose in a crowded market place. Just not smart.
Wow. Eight-year-olds shouldn't go to markets unsupervised? I'm glad none of my friends' parents thought that when I was growing up. It's no wonder there's a childhood obesity epidemic in much of the industrialized world.
About three weeks ago I met some guys I had first encountered on Slashdot, and was gang raped.
Two weeks ago I went back, but they were gone.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
check out this myCrawlSpace profile:
... well, you get the idea.
Name: John "Wayne"
Occuation: Entertainer
Hobbies: Making new friends, excavation, "sad clown" collectables.
Motto: Want to know how many friends are in MyCrawlSpace? I could tell you but then I'd have to
Not fitting in at school? You're certain to fit in myCrawlSpace
Some educational system is obviously indicated for a society of the size and complexity that any modern civilzation possesses. Mechanisms for socialization are pretty important, especially in cosmopolitan societies. My issue is that the present system's model is designed specifically to dumb people down, socialize them to be docile, effective desk jockeys (used to be factory ants). That's the major thesis of both those books I mentioned; the evolution of our school system was not accidental, it was intentional, it is wildly successful at what it was designed to do.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
I haven't logged on to my MySpace account in six months because I just can't take any more "pimped out" pages or embedded top 40 music videos.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The situation with the kid creating the parody profile of his school principal, despite how unkind he might have been, does not in any way justify the actions the school did. I'm glad the ACLU stepped in. This is clearly a principal that should not only be fired, but also totally banned from any school related job.
This is just indicative of the mentality of so many school officials and administrators. Many, and probably most (though I certainly met some who are not) school officials and administrators (especially principals and school board members) are what I would term "failed politicians". Like so many politicians in general, they want to be in a position to control other people's lives. But unlike real politicians, they just can't do so well when dealing with adults that can fight back against such attempts to be controlled. Kids, on the other hand, tend to be more naive about such things, and don't have as many means at their disposal to fight back. Thus the kids end up being the satisfaction for the these control freaks who get school jobs. While many of these "failed politicians" do function relatively well in normal school situations, quite many obviously go off on the deep end with unusual situations such as this, like Eric Trosch did. Someone able to handle the situation would have instead initially laughed at the situation, give it a little more fun for the students, and then in a couple days simply ignore it and let it go away. Obviously the severity of the parody indicates many other issues with this man. In a few weeks, the students would have gotten their fill of laughs, and moved on to new sources of entertainment at perhaps someone else's expense. But all the kids would still also be getting a proper full education, the school system would still have some cash to buy a better internet firewall, and some lawyer would have less money. Instead, what he is teaching the kids is how to behave poorly with unfavorable situations, which in a few years one of those kids will end up doing with a gun.
And all of this could happen just as easily on any social website, or even a website on a registered domain, such as maybe "www.bigmrtrosch.com" running anywhere in the world. It has nothing at all to do with any sexual dangers that teens may, or may not, face on MySpace.com.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... yeh, sure ... same arguments, all the time. That's why the criminality in the States is beyond any civilized place in the world ... 'cause guns don't kill people!
...
All these things are to be self-controlled - I would agree - but this would require decency, a level of intelligence beyond the average redneck anti-Iraq warrior, and a culture of more than a few years behind. If not - you get pictures like this linked all over photobucket, myspace, etc., and get the kids formed just right to go to war with the whole world, straight out of grade school
So, the article is comparing a the state of California (a physical region) with MySpace, which is in Cyberspace. To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison.
I happen to agree, but for other reasons.
So called "statutory rape" statistics are inherently misleading about the crime itself as well as the victims and the perpetrators...especially in a state like California, whose age of consent of 18 doesn't have any exception.
Consentual sex happens all the time between people of multiple age groups in various situations. The 62 caught in California hit peculiar circumstances (a parent finds out and decides they don't like it, or the underage person decides to enact revenge against their older lover, and it usually *has* to be a combination for a successful prosecution.)
Otherwise, statutory rape crimes aren't self-reporting.
We aren't talking about rape here - this is statutory rape, which just means the girls was underage. If it was just the boy who was underage, nobody would have been charged.
Unless, of course, you're Pamela Rogers... I'm sure there have been other cases. But you're right in that men have a societal barrier to claiming rape charges against a woman. Much like how earlier rulings stated that women who were dressed provocatively "were asking for it," it's assumed that men are always "asking for it" and therefore cannot be forced to have sexual congress.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Uh-huh... spare me. Your child is human, with human behavior, not some perfect deity.
*shrug* In the end, every party has the right to say no at any time prior to things happening. I don't know the particular case involved, but it's entirely possible that the girl did indeed show up, realized the lying about the age, and was still forced into sex. Heck, it could be that they even fooled around a bit beforehand, but she said no to the sex. She still has that right. What drives me crazy are the ones who admit to having said no retroactively. Those are the ones that make it difficult for the real cases to get their voices heard.
Personally, I think the laws on sexual congress should be based on maturity, not chronological age, but if we did that, a lot of people wouldn't legally have sex until they were 30. Then again, these are the same people having sex at 14 and getting people pregnant, so it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
STUPID EMO KIDS AND THEIR MYSPACES!!!!!!!!!!!! That's what it all comes down to.
I've seen it they post so much crap that was in the list of grievances , maybe if you stop talking about your drinking/suicidal thoughts you make up/where to find your "miserable lonely hide"! maybe just MAYBE!! things would turn out bettter for the rest of us people who know what NOT to put online... And No I'm not pro-censorship just Pro-Common sense.. you don't know who could be watching or reading.. maybe even your parents-- happened to me.. though I just use my myspace to spam stupid stuff at people....
http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html a thought, at any rate.
Obviously, since MySpace is bigger than California, we can compare raw statistics perfectly!
Reports that the paedophiles have seized a portion of the internet roughly the size of Ireland seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
The potentially monsterous progeny arising from assholes raping idiots.
Sexual predators hang out around target population. News @ 11.
Children are still far more likely to be abused by someone they know (family, friend of the family) than by an anonymous stranger on the internet. But when has evidence stopped the media from whipping people into a state of hysteria?
A better question is: how the hell do we take back our hijacked mainstream media?
To all the people saying "dont let kids online unless you are watching over their shoulder", what exactly are you worried about the kids getting access to?
I wasn't allowed to watch Simpson, YCDTOTV, Married With Children, and a few others in that vein.
Did it bother me? Not at all.
But my mom bought a NES the second Christmas they were out ('89 I think) and she played it just as much, if not more, than I did.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64/128 around 1987. I used it to play games mostly and learned a little bit of very simplistic BASIC programming then. To give you perspective I'm 24 now.
My parents bought a series of PCs in the 90s the first one of which contained PC-GEOS a well developed DOS-based 16bit GUI. Eventually we got on Prodigy and I did the BBS thing too.
When I was a teenager at age 14 I paid for broadband cable in my house. I then began to create websites for various small businesses and that kept me from ever having to have a "job" in high school. In fact I did so well with that I didn't have to have a "job" until my 3rd year in college because school kept me too busy to work on my other income-producing products.
Libertas in infinitum
No kidding.
The teenager across from us, who we've watched grow up from a baby, has now had two high-school parties. Both meant to be only for a few friends. Both times -- turns out this is normal now, to our and her mom's surprise -- the whole block filled up with kids carrying cell phones calling one another in. We had upwards of seventy kids on the street, one car damaged as a couple of different bunches of kids got into fights and knocked each other into it, a lot of broken glass and vomit around, kids who wouldn't leave til the police arrived.
Kids rolling up on bikes or racing down the block in their cars talking on cell phones. Always the cell phones. Every kid it seemed had this little blue glow in his or her hand.
Kids too drunk to stand up. Girls wavering down the block drunk or stoned an hour after the party had ended, who didn't know where they were.
Not bad, considering. A couple of weeks later, a few blocks a way, a teenage boy was knifed on the street outside a similar event and died there. Several other kids were injured. The boy had apparently tried to break up a fistfight.
This is stuff for the next Pied Piper legend happening. Figuring out how to prey on these kids is not going to be hard at all. It's very scary to see them as wide open, broadcasting their names and locations and condition, as the night gets late and dark.
"It was a successful party. Nobody got so drunk they stopped breathing."
I am a 8th Grade student who previously used, and enjoyed Myspace. The fact Myspace's dangers are incredibally over hyped. My School has had assembleys about internet safety and Myspace and these assembleys showed me that schools and parents severely underestimate our intelligence. If there is a sexual preadator we know, don't tell him any of our personal information thats not already on our MySpace, and tell him too "fuck off." Also MySpace is a valuble tool in helping people to be more social. However that doesn't mean parents should see there kid's MySpaces, during the age of most MySpace users people are supposed to break away from their parents, and MySpace helps. The same goes for schools, they shouldn't be looking at student's MySpace's it's not for them.
All of the stuff on MySpace.com is the same stuff that generations of kids talk about F2F, surreptitiously pass around in class, and keep in their diaries. Grownups are just shocked to see it. :-)
some people meet at family reunions and have underage sex