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A local woman believes her story illustrates just how frustrating it can sometimes be fighting Internet harassment.   Tina Austin claims someone harassed her by posting information on the popular trading website, craigslist.org, last February.   The postings gave Austin’s name and work cell phone number.   The three separate postings claimed Austin was giving away a diamond necklace, a Chevy Suburban, and another which was, let’s just say an “R” rated request.   “I ended up getting [the most phone calls for the diamond necklace],“ Austin said Wednesday.  “[I didn’t get] quite as much for the Suburban.“

For the home user, however, password safety requires more than on-the-fly thinking. Pacheco suggests a system built around a main word for all instances. The distinction is that the name of the site is added somewhere. For example, if the main word is "eggplant," the password might be "eggyyplant" Yahoo, "eggplantgg" for Google or "wleggplant" for Windows Live. He suggests listing the variations in an Excel spreadsheet.

Hackers rely on a lot of methods. Some, Rogers said, employ "shoulder surfing." That means what it sounds like -- looking over someone's shoulder as that person is typing in a password

The type of hardware being used can be a clue, said Rogers, a senior technical staffer in the CERT Program, a Web security research center in Carnegie-Mellon University's software engineering institute. It's easy to find a default password, typically in the user's manual on a manufacturer's Web site. If the user hasn't changed the default, that's an easy break-in.

Both the state Senate and Assembly have proposed anti-cyberbullying laws. Kathy Wilson of Sen. Carl Marcellino's (R-Syosset) office said that the Senate has proposed two bills in the last two years that add computers to the list of modes of illegal harassment, but the Assembly passed neither.The Assembly's website states that the Assembly has proposed bills "to define and prohibit the bullying, cyberbullying and hazing of students and others on school property" as well as to add a database for reporting such complaints, but has not passed either yet.

Both the state Senate and Assembly have proposed anti-cyberbullying laws. Kathy Wilson of Sen. Carl Marcellino's (R-Syosset) office said that the Senate has proposed two bills in the last two years that add computers to the list of modes of illegal harassment, but the Assembly passed neither.

The Assembly's website states that the Assembly has proposed bills "to define and prohibit the bullying, cyberbullying and hazing of students and others on school property" as well as to add a database for reporting such complaints, but has not passed either yet.

For the past two years Blumenthal and other states' attorneys general have negotiated with both Facebook and MySpace to implement more than 60 new safety measures to protect children from online predators and from gaining access to inappropriate content, like pornography.

Under the agreement with Facebook, its officials have agreed to prominently display safety tips, and to require users under the age of 18 to affirm that they have read the tips. Users over 18 can no longer search for under-18 users, and Facebook officials will automatically be notified when someone under 18 is in danger of providing personal information to an adult user.

Parents will also be provided with tools to remove a child's profile from the site. Inappro­priate images and content will be removed, and ads for age-restricted products, like alcohol and tobacco, will be limited to users old enough to purchase those items. Most significantly, Facebook agreed to diligently search for and remove profiles of registered sex offenders, and it will "in­crease efforts to remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyber-bullying and other violations of the site's terms of service and expel from the site individual violators of those terms."