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Students, tell us what you think about the Phoebe Prince case and about your experiences with bullying. Why do you think students bully others? How can bullying be lessened or stopped? What, if anything, can teachers do? Have you ever been bullied? Have you ever bullied other kids? What is the climate like at your school - are students harassed and taunted? What can you do when you see another student being bullied?

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person's identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

In this lesson, students share opinions and information about safety issues and concerns on social networking Web sites. They then develop public service announcements designed to inform their peers and guardians.

Following the recent death of a NY teen who committed suicide after being tormented by classmates, Dana Boyd reflects on the language of teens, who will frequently dismiss bullying as "stupid drama" in order to minimize its impact and save face because it distances both the perpetrators and the victims from pain. She recommends a focus on more positive concepts like "healthy relationships" and "digital citizenship" rather than the negative framing of bullying.

Software That Guards Virtual Playgrounds

The last "highlight" is particularly telling.

While Facebook is adding users, MySpace is losing them. Many user profile pages on MySpace are either cluttered or neglected, resembling a strip mall with pockets of empty storefronts. The users who remain tend to be younger and poorer, putting a drag on advertising revenue from blue-chip clients.

The special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.

Now comes new details about the parental control system coming to the App Store. All iPhone applications will be rated in one of four age categories: 4+, 9+, 12+, or 17+. When Apple announced the coming 3.0 release of its iPhone software, it referred to parental controls for apps.

If you're a Gadgetwise reader, you're among the 23 percent of the world's population that has Internet access. You've figured out how to download fresh news, print a boarding pass or tweet. But take a second and try to understand how it must feel to be undigital these days. There's a grating discomfort that comes from being left out of everyone else's secret language. I was reminded of how common this feeling is in my own hometown library last night, when I walked into a free public workshop on Facebook.

Two years ago, engineers at Google reported that about 10 percent of millions of Web pages they analyzed engaged in "drive-by downloads" of malware. Google today has about 330,000 Web sites listed as malicious, up from about 150,000 a year ago.