Topic: Cyber Bullying
My Contention (which people seem to find deeply insensitive (me?)):
Cyber Bullying is a manufactured crisis with roots steeped in public affirmation and dependence. Parents can prevent their children's addiction by limiting technology use and even restricting access to the Internet to prevent their children's from being ostracized to the point of suicide.
Opinions?
Cyber Bullying is a manufactured crisis with roots steeped in public affirmation and dependence. Parents can prevent their children's addiction by limiting technology use and even restricting access to the Internet to prevent their children's from being ostracized to the point of suicide.
Opinions?
I recently ceased all facebook participation. Zuckerberg called the users "dumb f*ckers". He has a good point...
You post here under your own name. So do I. Do does Alan. Should we regard LetsShrug as a "cyber bully"? I think not, but the point remains. What if Shrugger hid behind an anonymous remailer such as Tor, and from that emplacement, she populated all of your posts with out-takes of emails between you and your ex-girlfriend. Now THAT would be cyber-stalking, and it is NOT what the First Lady does. She is just a voice in the wind, listen to her or not as you choose…
As for this cyber bullying, I agree with you. I say either stay off the internet, stop telling the world your every move, or stop allowing anyone to see your facebook page (or whatever). For the love of Pete, kids these days have no appreciation for privacy or expectation of it... if that's how they think then they better learn to deal with the outcome. It's a rough world, everybody is not your friend, and its time to learn to deal with it...LOGICALLY. Crying over someone's unkind words (probably someone you don't like, or even know anyway is a crazy waste of time. If you go thru life trying to please the world you're in for a miserable existence.
I will say it again: There is no such thing as date rape. There is no such thing as date rape because their is no such thing as date larceny, date robbery, date murder, or date arson. The "date" is irrelevant. So, too, with "cyber" stalking.
You and I have gone a few rounds here in the Gulch. OK, that's fine. What if I sent a dead rabbit to your home -- and you had no way to prove to the police that it was me? See my reply to Alan about Kelley Misata's keynote address to the Lonestar Application Security Conference last October. Then, consider, again, that we are talking about teenagers whose parents have enough of a challenge to put food on the table in a collapsing economy. It lets us feel good about ourselves that we have all the answers. Providing those answers to others who need them could demand that we become social workers. Hopefully, some other solution exists.
… and maybe it does not. Perhaps teen suicides triggered by bullying must remain a reality, along with 40,000 traffic deaths a year.
(In the 1990s, I lived in a farming village of 3,000 and then about ten years later in a different small town. You could go to the post office without locking your front door. But, in theory, you always have that right. No one has a right to enter your home just because it is unlocked. They could not be charged with breaking and entering, only unlawful trespass. If they steal anything or do other harm, that second crime elevates the first to a felony.)
It may be that victimology is the only fruitful study within criminology. Prevent victimization and crime ceases to exist.
If that is true, why do you care about what you claim is the degradation of your borderland neighborhood? Why not just build a 9-foot wall around your place, have everything delivered, and live blissfully untouched by the Mexican invasion?
The fact is that you do care. You feel victimized - and perhaps rightfully so.
The same applies to the school age victims of bullies. It also applies to the victims of stalkers, robbers, burglars, and swindlers. We do not blame the victim. We punish the perpetrator.
If you have a better theory of justice, I am interested.
The trouble is the perpetrator uses Internet anonymity or blatant falsehoods in many cases to attack a victim. The onus is still on the parent to remove the access point to the Internet - the problem need not exist, let alone be allowed to occur.
I...
- have a 6 foot block wall around my property
- have a variety of weapons at my disposal
- have some private, non-commercial devices to alert me if someone is on my property.
- I have Internet restrictions placed in my router
- I've taught my kids never to post their actual names, their photographs, or their location anywhere on the web (they're old enough to do what they want now, but i never had an issue when they were younger.
The fact is the parent has the control and not some feel-good strangers who decree by consensus and are too lethargic to play parent to their developing children.
Te safety of my kids is my responsibility, the police are a secondary line of defense and the government has no role..
That is also why I pointed to victimology. In some science fiction utopia, there are no victims: no rapes, no murders, no robberies or burglaries, no art forgeries, or oceanside property … Everyone else is smarter than the smartest predator and predators all died off generations ago…
Here and now, among teens in particular, but with adults, also, predators are real and "cyber" is just the medium they use. They could (and do) send flowers with threatening letters inside. The aggression is the same.
With teens, in particular, the stalkers are anonymous and prove that they can follow you by including facts no one could know, except your closest friends. So, you really have no friends, no one to turn to. These predators excel at singling you out, culling you from the herd, and taking you down.
Last year, at a computer security conference here in Austin, one of the keynote speakers was one Kelley Misata who spoke on behalf of Tor. (Misata is now working with the CERIAS project of Purdue
and Suricata, an Open Source Foundation partner; and she is working on her doctorate at Purdue.) Kelley Misata had been cyber-stalked for eight years. She watched while her computer was taken over and worked remotely. Trashy emails were posted in her name from cuts and pastes from her own Facebook pages. She could not apply for a job without her stalker knowing it and intruding. She figured out who he was. However, the FBI said that they were powerless, and a judge refused to issue a restraining order, both because the stalker hid behind Tor and could not be identified. So, she took her MBA and her experience in marketing to Tor where she advocated for privacy and security. She now helps the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) while working on her doctorate at Purdue. (On my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... This was a woman with an MBA. Imagine if she had been a waitress and the victim was her teenage daughter. The law protects those who cannot protect themselves.
You said that you depend on yourself primarily, the police (in theory), and the government not at all. Again, that is not workable for most people here and now.
My wife (and I) are involved in community outreach programs in computer security, alerting people to the dangers they face and offering solution sets available from other sources. She just went around with a church group that she joined. The sign up on their website was not HTTPS. So, she did not sign up. When she called them, they said that they did not see the problem, since they were not asking for financial information, only your name and address, and some questions about your personal views on different topics…
That we can congratulate ourselves and each other does not make it profitable to condemn those who are still in the dark.