Life & Technology

For whatever reason, cyber bullying has been in the news over the past couple of months. There was the recent case in the US where mother Lori Drew was found guilty, and then had her conviction overturned, as being complicit in the suicide of 13 year old Megan Meier.

In Australia, there was the case of a 14 year old Geelong schoolgirl who also committed suicide after reading comments about herself on the internet.
Then there has been a couple of segments on Channel 9 and Channel 7 current affairs shows, as well as plenty of copy being written in the daily newspapers.

So it is of no surprise that this uniquely 21st century problem is finally getting some money thrown at it by the Federal Government, with Education Minister Julia Gillard announcing yesterday that $3 million will be spent on whether existing cyber-bullying programs work.

It will be interesting to see how affective these programs have been. The problem with cyber bullying, is that unless the police cyber crime division becomes involved, it is very hard for Joe Public to find out who the bully is – especially if it is anonymous. It seems that what teachers and government agencies rely on is appealing to peoples’ better natures, and/or getting victims to either tell somebody about it, or delete the offending text/post (or get it deleted by moderators).

A full-on strategy that brings bullies to account might be a lot harder due to the nature of the medium – unless you are a master of tracing IP accounts to their source, then your options are pretty limited at getting to the bottom of who is doing what to whom.

I for one, hope this money is well spent, so this blight on the tech sector can be kicked to touch once and for all.

Kindle owner Amazon is being sued by two owners of the e-book after the Internet retailer remotely deleted George Orwell’s 1984, which they had downloaded to their reader.

Amazon did the right thing, in that they had discovered that there were copyright issues with them having the book, so the pulled it. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has apologised profusely, going as far to say, “Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles,” Bezos wrote to customers. “It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.”

This has not appeased the two people who have brought the suit, because in one case at least, it was required reading for a school assignment, and they had made notes, which were rendered useless by the deletion of the book.

What interests me in this case is how technology can sometimes have a downside. If they had bought a real-life, tangible book, then they would not have had this problem.

A similar example is the iPod. If you use iTunes to download music to your iPod on one computer, you can’t do the same on another computer. This is to stop you going to a friend’s place and downloading his or her songs for free. In fact, if you try and do so, it will wipe your iPod clean of the songs you already have on the portable music player.

While I can see the point of view with regard to copyright, I guess what I’m trying to get at is this; although technology by far and away has some great benefits, it can also have some very annoying side effects.

Clip courtesy of the Nine Network Australia

Australian cricketer Phil Hughes got in a little bit of trouble from skipper Ricky Ponting for twittering his dropping, instead of it being announced via the usual, more formal channels.

Then there was the case were singers Brian McFadden and Delta Goodrem were stalked via Twitter, which caused them concern – why wouldn’t it? Karl also mentioned that he has been the victim of a rogue Twitter account, with somebody starting one up in his name, which lead to a lot of confusion amongst his friends and family.

Phil Hughes aside, how can you fix things when things go bad on a social networking sites?

Luckily there are a number of avenues for you to go through. First of all, if it is serious enough you can contact the Federal Police’s cybercrime division, who will act upon your complaint. Like any cybercrime, people tend to leave virtual fingerprints, which is a trail the police can follow to a degree.

You can also remove a post from Twitter. Of course, it might be too late because a tonne of people may have read it, but you can lessen the damage. If somebody is cyberstalking you, or you believe they are using your name in vain, you can contact Twitter, and if they think that you are indeed a victim, they will delete the account. It doesn’t stop them from trying to contact you again, of course, but at least they cannot carry on making your life a nuisance.

Finally, when all else fails – and you could see this as a sign of capitulation – you could stop Tweeting for a while. Not the ideal situation, but it could make the pain in the butt go away. See it here