Internet Gone
Bad
A 9-year-old is doing a report on cavemen. Along
with the many educational links he gets on Google, he comes across a
very unhelpful one. Apparently there is a pornographic site with the
word cavemen in its URL. He clicks on it, not knowing what to expect
and gets a rather obscene and inappropriate website.
Later, after he has recovered from the incident, the same 9-year-old goes to
a website where he is trapped in a popup infinite loop! The more he tries to
close the windows, the more show up.
After having to force quit his browser, the 9-year-old goes back online and finds
the personal AOL homepage of whom he thought was his best friend. Yet on his
friend’s site the 9-year-old finds many nasty things. In this the site has
some racial comments in it and some very vulgar language.
Finally he finished sulking over that, he goes back to his work on cavemen. He
comes across a website that says that cavemen had computers and PDAs. He being
the naïve, ignorant child he is believed it and put it in his report.
The World Wide Web is full of obscene, hurtful, racist, false and malicious material.
Pornography abounds on it. Racist material loaded with obscenities lurks around
every corner. Worse, material that can do actual physical harm also abounds on
the Web. The infinite popup loop the 9-year-old encountered is just the tip of
the iceberg. With enough naïveté, users can allow websites to steal
every password residing on the machine, edit personal preferences, and even erase
all data stored on the hard drive. Some web pages can even be equivalent to the
most malicious viruses.
What can be done about these horrible web pages? Nothing, for the most part.
The are all protected under the First
Amendment. You could get parental controls
that
only
allow
you
to
visit certain sites (or allow you to visit any site except for specified ones)
but
they can
be a
pain
and they usually create more problems than they Some companies that host pages
within the United States are legally bound to erase such material. But web pages
residing on overseas servers are not applicable to such laws. The only prevention
is on the part of the client. Avoid downloading unknown software. Always verify
information found on the Internet with that found in books. And above all, do
not visit websites that appear the least bit questionable. For every unsavory,
malicious website, there are thousands of other good websites that seek only
to contribute to the ever-growing knowledge base of the Internet.
For more information about parental controls and avoiding bad content
on the Internet, visit these sites:
http://www.cyberpatrol.com/
http://www.safetysurf.com/