InformationWeek

Four families are suing MySpace for failing to prevent adults from contacting and subsequently sexually assaulting their daughters.

The lawsuits charge MySpace and parent company News Corp. with negligence, gross negligence, fraud, fraud by nondisclosure, and negligent misrepresentation.

As InformationWeek's Antone Gonsalves reports, the assaults occurred in late 2005 and early 2006. Authorities arrested six men in connection with the attacks. Two pleaded guilty and others are awaiting trial.

In a post about the lawsuits on the Concurring Opinions blog, law professor Eric Goldman says, "These lawsuits are obvious losers for two independent reasons."

The Associated Press has an intriguing description of the user interface and software that comes with the One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop. It abandons the application-document-folder-desktop metaphor that's been used for PCs since the original Apple Macintosh in 1984, instead arranging files chronologically, in a "journal."

Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman's own kids are music pirates, he admitted in an interview. "Naturally, his kids were forced to cough up thousands of dollars to the RIAA to keep from getting sued. Right?" Ars Technica asks rhetorically. Of course not -- Bronfman says he disciplined the kids (he says he prefers to keep the details in the family) and gave them a talking-to about stealing music.

Of course, music piracy is wrong, but the problem with the current system for dealing with piracy is that punishments are far too draconian. Casual music piracy is morally equivalent to shoplifting -- but we treat it like grand larceny, dragging people into criminal court and ruining their lives. Bronfman understands this principle when it comes to his own children.

That's a question posed to the New York Times's "The Ethicist" column. The columnist, Randy Cohen, has a completely insane response: The IT manager should remain silent.

The questioner writes: "I am an Internet technician. While installing software on my company’s computer network, I happened on a lot of pornographic pictures in the president's personal directory, including some of young children — clearly less than 18, possibly early teens. It is probably illegal and is absolutely immoral. Must I call the police? I think so, but I need my job."

Legal action in Italy raises the question of whether Web 2.0 sites should be held legally liable for content posted to them by users. Italian authorities are investigating Google executives in connection with a segment on Google Video showing students at a Turin school bullying an autistic student. The executives are being scrutinized for violating Italian law on appropriate content. "In the US, sites like Google Video, SoapBox, and YouTube are generally protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants 'safe harbor' to the sites so long as they are not the 'publishers' of any illegal material and take it down immediately when requested," Ars Technica notes.

This is neat -- use a hollowed-out hardcover book as an iPod case.. But first you'll need to know how to hollow out a book to put a secret chamber in it..

For added niftyness: Put your cell phone in there too. Use embedded magnets to hold the book cover closed when not in use.

Use a book with a plain cover, and laminate the cover of an old pulp magazine on the book. That would look great.

(Via Lifehacker)

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists have assembled a Google Earth map file that shows the locations of America's nuclear weapons.

Would more Americans pursue technology careers if those students got their college educations for free? The Programmers Guild, an advocacy group for U.S. tech professionals, thinks so.

In fact, the guild is about to announce a new proposal advocating that the U.S. government provide "100% subsidies" of tuition and expenses for American students enrolled in degree programs in computer science, engineering, and other fields where there are U.S. skill shortages.

How would the U.S. pay for such a program, you ask? One source for funding could come from hiking government fees that U.S. companies pay to employ foreign H-1B visa holders to $5,000 per worker, per year.

Here we go again. The music industry is targeting Web sites that allow users to share music. This time it's not recordings, but helpful hints on how to play the guitar.

The well-intentioned One Laptop Per Child initiative has always faced the question, "Buy technology, or spend more on teachers?" Reports out of India suggest that country will choose people.

For the kick-off session at its annual faculty summit in Redmond, Wash., last week, Microsoft convened a panel of tech leaders and educators to wax philosophic about hot IT topics of the day: declining federal research spending, job competition from India and China, and why the United States can't attract kids to math and science. There's been a lot of ink spilled about those shortcomings of American competitiveness lately. But this confab had an ace in the hole.

Sitting on a stage between Microsoft exec Craig Mundie, the White House's Science and Technology Policy Office's associate director, the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the dean of UC Berkeley's engineering college was Dan Mote, the president of the University of Maryland and a co-author of a federal report released last fall that's got the attention of everyone from the president to Congress. "Students do not see opportunity in our field," said Mote, referring to IT and computer science. And it's not just kids in poor districts--even the rich kids don't get jazzed about tech. That's going to be a problem as computer companies hunt for the next generation of workers.

In our July 17 cover story, InformationWeek looked at what Microsoft, IBM, Intel, SAP, and other tech companies are doing to attract today's grade-school and high-school kids to computer science--and why they're not always bullish about the prospects.

Teenagers never listen to their parents, right? But when it comes to not pursuing tech careers, kids seem to be tuning in.

I've been hearing a lot lately from IT pros who say they're telling their own kids not to go into technology careers. That's the same advice many nontechie parents have been giving their kids since the dot-com bust.

With so many companies purportedly offshoring, outsourcing, and hiring cheap H-1B workers, that $40,000 (give or take a couple of zeros) in tuition money may as well be flushed down the toilet, they say. Why drain college savings or saddle kids with a zillion dollars in student loan debt to pursue a career with no job security and a very bleak future, they say.

My grade-school-age daughter came home with a permission slip needing a signature in advance of her Brownie troop's field trip to a local tutoring center. But I bristled when I saw the information required. The center, a commercial business, wanted to know her name, address, age, grade level, school, favorite subject, and academic proficiency in math, reading, and spelling.

Campus security at a New Jersey university is getting help from an eye in the sky. Combining global positioning satellite and cell phone technologies, campus security officials can be alerted if a student fails to arrive at a destination on time.

Charity, it seems, is catching, not to mention competitive. The Maine Department of Education recently struck a deal with Apple Computer to provide iBooks for 36,000 students for $289 apiece as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.

The iBooks come with plenty of nifty software. But nothing from Google. So Google, ever committed to organizing the world's information, has decided to donate Google Earth and SketchUp Pro for installation on every public-school computer in the state.

From the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" department: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group Tuesday said it will use BitTorrent's peer-to-peer publishing platform to distribute flicks such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Matrix, Dog Day Afternoon, and Natural Born Killers, as well as TV shows such as Babylon 5 and Dukes of Hazzard.

The resounding message I kept hearing while reporting on one of the features in this week's edition of InformationWeek is that we parents are, by and large, abdicating our duty to our kids. And that if parents took a more proactive role, many of the problems kids are running into would be mitigated or stopped before they even began.

Search engines aren't the only companies being sent subpoenas. As part of its campaign to demonstrate the futility of Internet filtering, the U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed at least 34 Internet companies and software makers. The story is now posted on InformationWeek.com.

I discovered this thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed with the Department of Justice. The DOJ complied, though rather selectively. I asked for records of government demands for information made to search engines or ISPs from January 2005 to the present.

I'm no expert, but I am a parent of three teenagers who, thankfully, have been safe so far. My reaction to the news about Microsoft jumping into the monitoring space with a free tool to be available this summer is that it sounds great, but I hope parents realize that the use of any monitoring software isn't by itself enough to guarantee kids' safety.

You know the old saying: Timing is everything. The best time to start a new diet, for example, is not the same week Girl Scout cookies are delivered. I learned that lesson last week, and I'm not turning back until the last Thin Mint has been consumed! So when is the right time to find ways to keep your kids safe online? In a word: Now. But ask 10 people about their strategies, and you'll get 10 different answers--filters, computers in a visible family area, talking to their kids about good and bad Web sites, etc. We all want to trust our kids to make the right choices, but let's face it: There's plenty of crap out there that they could inadvertently stumble upon. Or they could innocently give out personal information to the wrong people. In addition to your parenting techniques, what are your kids' schools doing to teach Internet safety?

In today's podcast, we cover security issues impacting Apple OS X and Microsoft's reaction to a bounty for discovering a Windows flaw. Also, we look at possible details on the Windows Vista packaging options, examine dual-core CPU price cuts, and pose the question of whether technology's role in our lives is growing too big.

First of all, three cheers for Microsoft! The latest news has the company defending its decision to cooperate with the Justice Department in an anti-pornography effort.

Bob Evans turns his razor-sharp pen on self-styled "privacy advocates" who object to the government subpoenaing search records in defense of the Child Online Protection Act. But you don't have to be a kook to be worried about government setting a big bucket to scoop up thousands of gallons of information about Internet searches.

I'm a night owl, or, as one of my smarty-pants sisters likes to put it, a vampire. I don't require lots of sleep, and I can get so much done in the distraction-free hours of the night. That's also when I happen to listen to TV the most--usually in background for a little white noise. Every now and then, something flashing across the screen from one of the mostly boring late-night talk shows catches my attention. The other night it was the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show. He did a very amusing sketch with another guy titled something like, "Words We Didn't Know 10 Years Ago." Basically, they sat down and talked about iPods and IMing each other. It was cute.

When Dutch credit-card processor Vorotel cut ties with Bigfunhouse, the online payment site that provided access to Webcam pornography closed, a small victory was won in the war against Internet child porn.

When Dutch credit-card processor Vorotel cut ties with Bigfunhouse, the online payment site that provided access to Webcam pornography closed, a small victory was won in the war against Internet child porn.

How dumb can some bloggers be? That's a question 18-year-old Blake Ranking is pondering as he faces five years in prison and 10 years on probation for causing an accident that killed one friend and severely injured another. "It was me who caused it," Ranking confessed in a blog three days after the October 2004 accident.

The article by Kurt Eichenwald details a new side to the Internet's great shame of child pornography. It describes a 13-year-old boy who posted Web-cam pictures of himself online in an effort to meet friends, and found child predators instead. From a beginning where a man paid him $50 to sit with his shirt off in front of his Web cam, he moved to selling naked images of himself and worse.

At age 13, Justin Berry began a five-year Net business selling images of his body for gifts and cash, at times fostered by some of the Internet's most respected and popular companies. Now, the Bakersfield, Calif., 19-year-old is working with the FBI to go after thousands of adults who encouraged him and other youngsters to perform sordid sexual acts in front of their Webcams and from behind their closed bedroom doors.

I value the contributions information technology has made to our lives probably more than most people. I make my living on the Internet and spend the bulk of my time managing Web content and technology projects, and really enjoy working in this fast-evolving medium. Information technology -- in the form of a wirelessly enabled laptop computer and the omnipresent cell phone -- has permanently changed the lifestyle of my family, particularly as the computer's value as an educational tool increases almost daily.

During my five-plus years at InformationWeek, it's safe to say that no one has scared me (in a good way) as much as Laura Chappell. To be clear, it's not Chappell's person that scared me--it was the tiny sliver of the knowledge she shared.

Parents don't have automatic access to their teenagers' electronic medical records, and perhaps they shouldn't.

What in the name of Grand Theft Auto is going on? Every time I look up, there's another ominous sign of the growing impact of video games. The latest mind-bender? A Chinese man was arrested in Japan last week for using bot-controlled characters to mug other characters in the online game Lineage II and then selling his ill-gotten booty for cash on a Japanese auction site. What's next--virtual bankruptcies?

Most Americans, even those with little wealth, can't live these days without a car, a microwave, and cable TV. Add to that fast Internet access.

As my wife, Laura, and I head north to Quebec for a vacation in a few weeks, we'll have a traveling companion: a laptop PC. We aren't alone. Lots of people bring their laptops on vacation.

Surprise! The early adopters of RFID are not all giant retailers and manufacturers. In fact, while many of these companies quietly run their pilot tests, RFID seems to be moving fastest into the people-tracking realm, and most especially in the area of monitoring children.

Never a fan of science fiction in my voracious book-inhaling youth, I have nonetheless developed a love of sci-fi movies and TV series. I loved The Jetsons as a kid, and more recently, have been an enthusiastic viewer of the entire family of Star Trek spin-offs (TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise), Farscape, and Stargate. Besides the adventures, among the fascinations of these programs is the enormous amount of complicated stuff the characters know as a matter of course, the processes that are automated, and all those nifty little gadgets. It wouldn't surprise me if the creators of electronic books got at least some of their creative flow from watching the Enterprise and Voyager crews reading books on tablets and online.

The Government Accountability Office, in a recent report entitled File Sharing Programs: The Use of Peer-to-Peer Networks to Access Pornography, said Google and Yahoo search engines failed to effectively block pornographic and erotic images. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, conducted its tests in February, as we reported last week. Much has changed since last winter's test.

After spending a couple of days this week surrounded by dozens of teens and tweens at a WiredKids summit in D.C., it became pretty clear to me that many of our young devote an awful lot of time to writing.