Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Someone Get These People A Dateline DVD

In the first of what is sure to be many lawsuits against social netowrking sites, a 14 year old girl and her Mother (I guarantee mostly her mother) is suing myspace.com, their parent company and a 19 year old of sexual assault (the crime itself was perpetrated by the 19 year old, myspace did not sexually assault this girl).  This absurd.  I read a bunch of the comments on this site, and I agree with most of them.  Since when is it the total responsibility of a website or ISP to protect minors who willingly go out on dates with perfect strangers?  Seriously, when are people going to stop treating the internet and WWW like some magic black box that you can't understand.  Chat rooms have been around for like 15 years now.  15 years of warnings about sexual predators and people who lie to childrent to prey on them.  Numerous parodies have been created about the classic conversation between some fat balding man and some cracked out whorish looking women where each one describes themselves and totally opposite from what they look like.  Those were the days of just straight text, now we have websites where you can post pictures and video and people can see all these little blurbs about you and we are still singing the same song, "Internet, Won't you protect me and my ilk from those that would hurt us?".  The answer is no, you take the good, you take the bad.  You take them both and then you have the internet.

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