Group items tagged

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.

FEW DISTRICTS HAVE MORE MILES on their 1-to-1 computing initiatives than Texas' Irving Independent School District, where the teachers have had laptops since 1996 and the current student program began with a pilot launched in 2001. Today, the Irving 1-to-1 program puts close to 12,000 laptops in the hands of students and teachers throughout the district.

After nearly a decade, Owen and her team have learned a few things about maintaining 1-to-1 computer programs in K-12 environments. The cornerstone of her strategy: personnel. Owen keeps two technicians on duty at the 1-to-1 high school campuses, and one at every other campus. On top of that, the district employs a central team of five technicians whose job it is to resolve problems that people at the campus level can't handle.

Many of the most egregious acts of cyberbullying do not take place during school hours or on school networks, a situation that presents a dilemma for public school administrators: If they punish a student for off-campus behavior, they could get hit with a freedom of speech suit.  If they do nothing, students may continue to suffer and school officials theoretically could get hit with failure to act litigation. For school administrators, it appears to be an unfortunate “catch-22.” For lawyers, it’s a “perfect storm,” pitting freedom of speech advocates against the victims of cyberbullying and schools that try to intervene. There are no easy answers in this arena, few laws, and no well-established precedents that specifically deal with cyberbullying.

“School administrators can intervene in cyberbullying incidents, even if the incidents do not take place on school grounds, if they can demonstrate that the electronic speech resulted in a substantial disruption to the educational environment.”

These cases illustrate not only a lack of precedent on cyberbullying cases, but also a dilemma for school administrators on how to handle cyberbullying.  “There are few laws that address how to handle cyberbullying, and many schools don’t have an internal policy to deal with cyberbullying that takes place off-campus,” offers Deutchman.  “It may take an unfortunate and tragic event on school property to get more schools to consider tackling electronic behavior that originates off campus.  It’s only a matter of time before a cyberbully, or the victim of cyberbullying, uses deadly force during school hours.”

Even Google has failed to extend its golden touch to social-networking sites. In 2006 Google paid MySpace $900 million to place ads on its pages. The search giant also operates its own social network, Orkut, which has been growing, especially outside the US. But in a February call with financial analysts, Google cofounder Sergey Brin conceded that the investments “didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped…. I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet.”

“People clearly, especially on the social networks, [are] not particularly interested in clicking on the ads,” says Mr. Brooks, who as editor of socialnetworkingwatch.com has followed the online industry for a decade. “Advertising needs to evolve, and social networks are forcing this change. People are really tired of being assaulted [by ads], but they still love to buy.”

As users share personal information within their networks, companies have an opportunity to capture and employ this data for targeted marketing. Social networks are building huge databases about where users go and the people they connect with, says Fred Stutzman, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina who studies social networks.

hildren like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

n fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find fun in embarrassing and pushing around others.

Typical griefer behavior includes: taunting others, especially beginners; thwarting fellow teammates in the game; using inappropriate language; cheating; forming roving gangs with other griefers; blocking entryways; luring monsters toward unsuspecting players; or otherwise using the game merely to annoy a convenient target or to harass a particular player who has reacted to their ill will.

, griefers have some gaming companies concerned about losing subscribers. As a result, many game sites and providers are becoming less tolerant of griefers and are employing new methods to police for them and otherwise limit their impact.