Safe and Secure

Last week, Facebook announced its new Groups feature, which is designed to limit some of your communications to a subset of your Facebook friends. But there is the danger that you could actually be talking to lots of people who aren't on your Friends list at all.

In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "There are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once, but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers. If you don't have a way to do that, … Read more

There has been a lot of concern about young people posting too much information about themselves online, but a study commissioned by security company AVG found that 92 percent of U.S. children have some type of online presence by the time they are 2 years old. A third of U.S. mothers posted pictures of newborns, and 34 percent of U.S. moms said they had posted sonograms of their as-yet unborn child.

The study, conducted by Research Now, surveyed 2,200 mothers with young children in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, New … Read more

commentary The recent suicide of Tyler Clementi, which raised the visibility of cyberbullying and digital ethics, is serving as a call to action to end something much deeper than that: cruelty, homophobia, and a distorted sense of entitlement to disclose information about others.

Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, Dharum Ravi, and Rutgers student Molly Wei (both also 18) allegedly used a Webcam to record and live-stream Clementi kissing another male in his dorm room.

What these two students did was wrong for a number of reasons--and it would have … Read more

The Stuxnet computer worm that may have been designed to attack a nuclear facility in Iran could have been state sponsored, according to two security experts with whom I spoke.

"We can tell by the code that it's very, very complex to the degree that this type of code had to be done, for example, by a state and not, for example, some hacker sitting in his parents basement," said Symantec security researcher Eric Chien. Chien added, however, that "there's nothing in the code that points to the particular author" or "what their … Read more

As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski is playing a key role in what could turn out to be sweeping changes in the way the Internet reaches children in schools and libraries. He's also the point man in a national debate on Net neutrality as some Internet service providers square off against activists who demand that the federal government ensure that companies not be able to prioritize network traffic.

Prior to his appointment as FCC chairman by President Obama in 2009, Genachowski spent more than a decade in the private sector as co-founder of LaunchBox, a managing … Read more

Anyone who has used Twitter has seen those shortened URLs from TinyURL.com, Bitly, and other such services. The advantage of those shortened URLs is that they take up less space, which can be very important on Twitter, where messages are limited to no more than 140 characters, but the disadvantage is that you don't know where you're going until you're already there.

Unlike regular URLs, which show the actual domain to which you're navigating, these are meaningless codes that give you no clue of the actual destination. As a result, there is the possibility that … Read more

Ever wish you could be a fly on the wall for what your kids post on Facebook and other social media sites? One option would be to get them to friend you, but a lot of kids are reluctant to let that happen. Privacy issues aside, some kids find it uncool to have their parents show up on a friends list.

AOL, in partnership with SocialShield, is launching AOL SafeSocial, a $9.99-per-month service that lets parents monitor their kids' online activities without having to be a "friend."

The service doesn't work in stealth mode. In fact, … Read more

In designing its new Places geolocation service, Facebook seems to have learned from its past privacy blunders. The new service has multiple layers of privacy control, but as with other aspects of Facebook privacy, users need to put some thought about whether and how they want to disclose their location. Facebook has also created an extra level of privacy for its under-18 users, prohibiting them from displaying their location to anyone other than their friends.

The first thing to know about Places is that it's not fully automatic. You have to "check in" or be tagged at … Read more

A virtual world aimed at kids between 6 and 14 enables them to interact with each other, play games, and create and share their own musical creations.

The world looks like a lot of other virtual words for children, where avatars walk around and enter a variety of rooms. But each of the rooms in ToonsTunes has a music theme, and one of those rooms, the Recording Studio, lets kids use a tool called "Mixo-O-Matic" that lets them lay down tracks from drums, guitar, bass, keyboard, and other instruments.

Kids can control the beat and the genre, (country, … Read more