hosted.ap.org — Connecticut lawmakers unveiled legislation Wednesday that would require MySpace.com and other social-networking sites to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can post profiles. The bill comes a day after a man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for using MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old Ct. girl.
Mar 7, 2007 View in Crawl 4
oddmanoutMar 8, 2007
yea, one time, but then they could monitor whatever we do whenever we do it... personally, i don't want someone knowing what health problem i'm researching, what political journals i'm reading, or even what kind of porn i like to look at.
drekorMar 8, 2007
@ TehAdamz0rIf you wanted to turn his quote against him accurately, it would have been like this:"Sorry America, it's your own government's fault. Remember them next election day."So, it's not Connecticut or America's, fault their respective governments are stupid. However, if they don't change them, they're culpable.Now, lets leave the non-sequitor America bashing out of this and agree that Connecticut does not run the internet.
allnightchemistMar 8, 2007
William "Connecticut Bill" Dawley (born February 6, 1958 in Norwich, Connecticut) was a Major League Baseball pitcher from 1983 to 1989 for the Houston Astros, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies, and Oakland Athletics. He was used exclusively as a relief pitcher in his career.
Closed AccountMar 8, 2007
There has been some research on MySpace about this. Dr. Rosen from the Univ. of California at Dominguez Hills has been studying it for years. Around 9% of individuals on MySpace below the age of 18 have been solicited for sex. Considering there are over 150 million MySpacers according to Widipedia we are talking about a very large number of incidents. He also found that only 38% of parents bother to check their kids site and 60% never talk to them about what they are posting.
leomarthMar 9, 2007
Are they going to slice the users open and count the rings? =D
kuzotzMar 9, 2007
getting rid of myspace is easy.. They still run their servers on Windows NT.. XD
oddmanoutMar 9, 2007
What makes you say they're on NT? MySpace uses a 20 terabyte scalable cluster of Isilon IQ 1920i servers running the OneFS operating systems software. As much as i'm going to get dugg down by the Linux fanboys, we all know Redhat and Apache would go down in seconds with that much traffic.
smackheroMar 10, 2007
@Popdmb:Nitecoder raised a fair question since you used a rather loaded word without any objective qualifications. There's no need to get defensive about it.If you determine a social network's "legitimacy" based on any kind of meaningful metric (such as the maturity of the users or its usefulness for specific networking opportunities) then just elaborate on it. Jumping to angry ad hominems merely illustrates your lack of meaningful input and suggests a certain level of social ineptitude.Social networking sites provide opportunities to interact with a large base of users with diverse personalities. Because myspace allows users to commit web design taboos speaks nothing about the quality of their userbase. Ultimately it's not up to the social network to keep user actions/behavior in line with what's pleasing to you. It's still up to each person to choose their network interactions wisely.Personally, I don't like dealing with profiles overloaded with gaudy / distracting media either, but i'm still in control of my interactions on the site, and i haven't had any problems so far. I don't go around searching for profiles of 16-year-old Jeffrey Star fans, and all of my friends on myspace have reasonably tasteful profiles. The only way to make social websites work for you is to be discerning about the people you network with.Clumping everyone on myspace together with the worst examples merely shows that you lack that kind of discernment. You do realize that many of the offending profiles on myspace are owned by users also on facebook right? Just because you can't tell that they're raging idiots because the format is much more sanitized doesn't make facebook any more "legitimate."Myspace provides technological tools facilitating the development of specific types of networks useful for music promotion and other practical ends has made the most successful social network on the web. Ragging on its users when you can't conduct yourself sensibly is just hypocritical.
paullevMar 10, 2007
CT's approach is easy, ineffective, and unconstitutional. <a class="user" href="http://www.paullevinson.net/archives/connecticut_going_for_the_easy.phtml">http://www.paullevinson.net/archives/connecticut_going_for_the_easy.phtml</a>