Cyberspace Is Not A Playground for Sex Offenders

Karen, thanks for the flag!

good stuff:

Rhonda J Mangus, I like this story. It's good stuff.

It's unfortunate that cyberspace has become the new playground; it's a hell of a lot more dangerous than the monkey bars and swings. Not only do kids/teens have to worry about sex offenders, there's also been numerous bullying incidents at well. Most recently is that women from Missouri who got indicted today after posing as a 16 year old boy. After engaging in an online relation with a 13 year old girl, she began sending her cruel messages and the girl ended up committing suicide.  Because many of these cases are unprecedented due to the fairly recent use of the internet, the federal prosecutor was somewhat concerned the punishment was too aggressive. Personally, I don't think there is a harsh enough punishment for this sort of behavior.

michelle, thanks for stopping by, your comments, and the flag! Cyberspace is definitely a dangerous "playground" in both terms of sexual predators and bullying.  Thankfully however the matters are being addressed.  Thanks again!

good stuff:

Rhonda J Mangus, thank you for your contribution, and I'm clicking on good stuff. However, there is a flaw in the policies that are implied by the authorities here. (Away from my writing on politics, I'm also a software developer, and I have the eyes to see the following.) Screen names, chat room names, and email accounts -- let's call them handles -- are loosely coupled to individuals. We should face it that handles are like nicknames or pseudonyms. As easily as they can be adopted, they can be abandoned. So, what they lack is permanence, uniqueness, and positive identification of an individual. When we think of people's "real names," there is supposed to be a one-to-one relationship. (Actually, in real life there is duplication in the names of individuals, but leaving that aside for the sake of simplifying the discussion -- at least we understand or reckon that one name stands for one person, who in turn has only one "real name.") But, when there is free and anonymous access for handles, one person could pick up 50 of them. In addition, when one handle is abandoned, it may return to "available" for reuse by a new person making a new account. (The policy about this will vary from web site to web site.)

* = * => What happens when a handle is abandoned, returns to "available," and then is picked up by a new, innocent person? That's the flaw in this policy. Your own daughter, if not yourself, could just as easily choose a new screen name that used to be used by a predator. We need to criminalize only criminals and their behavior. We should not criminalize handles. For some circumstances -- especially for communicating with minors under 18 -- it is understandable to have a list of "persona non grata." But it is NOT sensible to have a list of "handles non grata." What if your daughter innocently chose (e.g.) IM2SEXY4U, and then became subject to treatment as a sex offender?

While I applaud the attempt on the part of the legislature to "do something," the approach in this article is flawed, faulty, and poorly thought through. For what it's worth, I feel the same way about some basic protocols of the Internet. SMTP, the email protocol, being the biggest example of a protocol that "wasn't ready for the real world" when it was released. It permits spoofing and fake headers and in the result, it gets us lots of spam. Clearly there must be a new protocol for identity and authentication. When that happens widely, then we will be less worried about handles because we will have the "real name" of the offenders behind the handles.