{"id":87,"date":"2006-06-21T10:21:29","date_gmt":"2006-06-21T10:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.bananasplit.info\/?p=87"},"modified":"2006-06-21T10:39:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-21T10:39:00","slug":"the-keyboard-is-mightier-than-the-sword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/?p=87","title":{"rendered":"The keyboard is mightier than the sword"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today The Register<\/a> has this article<\/a> on a woman suing MySpace<\/a> because her daughter was sexually assaulted after using their services to talk to a man.<\/p>\n

I hate cases like this where a free service is being charged due to the actions of one of its users. The girl in question is 14 years old, met a guy she talked to on the Internet and subsequently was sexually assulted. That’s not nice, but it’s not the fault of the Internet or the services that run on it. Communication systems cannot be held accountable for what is communicated.<\/p>\n

Recently my parters daughter (aged 15) announced she was meeting Mike on her 16th birthday and they were getting a place together. Mike is nothing more than a series of messages typed into MSN Messenger<\/a>, but to her he is very special. To me this is a worry. Who is Mike? How old is Mike? Where is Mike? The chances are I will never find out as the infactuation will probably pass on to the next MSN “boy of the month”. If she does actually meet him one day then so be it, that’s how life works and all girls meet boys and go on first dates. How on earth can MSN be blamed if it goes wrong? They simply provided a communication medium between two people in the same way as an email or even a sheet of paper and a pen could. To sue them for it would be utterly ridiculous. Next chat programs will be accused of spreading pornography or pirated music. The RIAA will be jumping up and down screaming that chat programs allow file transfers and must be banned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today The Register has this article on a woman suing MySpace because her daughter was sexually assaulted after using their services to talk to a man. I hate cases like this where a free service is being charged due to the actions of one of its users. The girl in question is 14 years old,… Continue reading The keyboard is mightier than the sword<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stmellion.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}