Babble

A police officer's talk on internet safety outraged an auditorium of high school students in Windsor, Colorado on Tuesday, when he made examples of students' actual MySpace pages without asking them first. John F. Gay III was trying to teach the students about how easily pedophiles can access personal information posted on MySpace and ...

The irony isn't lost on me here - I'm a writer on the Internet, and I get to tell all the folks who run around running down the Internet that somebody just shot a clip full of holes in their argument.  The number one danger to our kids isn't the Internet. It's themselves.  The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, ...

How many times have I clicked that little box swearing to the invisible Internet gods that I’m over 18 and thought of how great it would be if it were that easy to tell bald-faced lies about myself during, say, job interviews or insufferable dates? (And get your minds out of the gutter; there’s one reason and one reason only that I ...

As has already been well established, teenage kids and younger are getting into hot water on MySpace and other social networking sites, keeping unknown company with pedophiles and other unsavories.  In an effort to help parents monitor Internet use, the Broward County Sherriff's Office issued Internet safety guidelines for parents, such as ...

Surely you've read a bazillion stories warning about the dangers of kids using MySpace, Facebook, et al, and giving up personal information, exposing themselves to predators, etc, and those fears are founded. Just ask Megan Meier's parents. But at least those sites are popular enough that if you even get a whiff of your kids using them, ...

One of our oldest son’s favorite books when he was younger, which was read to him a Guinness Book record 1,097,653 times in one calendar year, was called “Eight Silly Monkeys”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It begins, “Eight silly monkeys sitting sedately on the floor. One got up and walked out the door. Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, ...

Families today are inundated with bad environmental news.  Climate change, super-bugs, explosive growth of autism, and tainted food supplies hover around our subconscious making us jumpy, nervous, and helicopter-y.  As more and more people become professors of Internet research, misinformation is easily promulgated and theories are ...

As 6 p.m. rolls around and the new iPhone goes on sale, I can only sit back and thank my lucky stars Emmeline is not a teenager -- because she would be acting very much like I have been in the past few days. ''I waaaaah-nt wuuuuuu-ne!'' And then my wife would have to say ''No, god damnit, NO!'' to two of us. All day. We've written before about ...

Concerned about the dangers of online predators, mom-of-five Mary Kay Hoal launched a social networking site that she hopes will provide a safe space for kids aged 9 to 18 to interact. But can places like Yoursphere -- which charges a monthly access fee and checks to make sure nobody on it is a registered sex offender -- really serve as ...

The recent wave of recalls and warnings from China has ignited worldwide concern about the safety of Chinese products in a wide swatch of industries.  Surprisingly, safety experts in the U.S. believe that the world's largest toymaker, Mattel, may be the best role model for how to operate prudently in China. From the NY Times comes the ...