PredatorSpace

Its really beginning to get old. Parents trying to hold online communities, such as MySpace, responsible for children's actions. You think that if parents spent as much time and effort educating and monitoring as they do filing lawsuits then maybe this wouldn't be a major problem. It is starting to get harder and harder to navigate the internet without finding a story about an underage child that was taken advantage of by an online predator.
From what I have read, MySpace has a way to prevent underage (for some reason I think the limit is set at 13 year of age) surfers from creating accounts with the site. However, as we all know it is almost impossible to verify if someone is telling the truth about their age when online. If the system is like that of other sites then all it ask is for the user to input their date of birth, and anyone with basic math knowledge can figure out what fake birthday they need to be allowed to use the site. Personally I believe that asking for a credit card or checking account number is a much more reliable method of age verification, but this to has its obvious flaws (if they are not immediately obvious to you then too bad, because I am not going to waste time explaining such a trivial matter).
Here is a typical "MySpace story". Basically the stupid girl said that she was 18 (in truth she was only 13) and met a 19 year old guy online. We all know what happened next so no need to get into it. One Question I have is, how the hell did she manage to meet him? I mean as you know she certainly wasn't able to drive to the meeting place so someone had to give her a ride. But I digress. According to this article there is some intelligence in Texas. Yes, it was a Texas Judge that realized that what caused this inappropriate meeting were the deceitful actions of an idiotic 13 year old girl.
Now I'm no parent, but I think that I somehow managed to pick up a thing or two about raising children from my parents. One of the first things I learned before ever using the internet was that you are never to agree to meet people in public unless you already know them in person. Also is it not a parent's job to protect their children? I would take this also include monitoring their internet activity until they believe that the child can be trusted and is mature enough to know how handle this new freedom.
Well I could go on for some time, but I think I'll head to bed now.

Dave Chappelle and Naruto.