sex-offenders
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Over 2,100 sex offenders discovered and banned from online games
New York Attorney General Eric T. Schniderman says that five gaming companies, including NCSoft and THQ, have agreed to purge the accounts of over 2100 registered sex offenders from their services. Earlier this year, over 3500 accounts were purged from major online game services run by Microsoft, Apple, Blizzard, EA, and others, and this latest drive adds more to that total (including some from Sony, which agreed to the initial purge but wasn't able to remove the accounts until now).The goal here is to keep registered sex offenders (who are required by law to register their email addresses, screen names, and other online information) away from children who might be playing on these platforms, and prevent them from contacting potential prey anonymously. Operation: Game Over, as this drive is being called, is the first instance of using this registration information to keep predators off of gaming networks. Hopefully, says Schniderman, it will help "block sex offenders from using gaming systems as a vehicle to prey on underage victims."
EU Written Declaration 29 wants you to think of the children, hand over all your search results
Oh boy, the EU's back on the crusade path again. This time, the Brussels brain trust has decided it will end pedophilia, child pornography, and other miscreant activities by simply and easily recording everyone's search results. Because, as we all know, Google searches are the central cog by which the seedy underworld operates. Here's how Declaration 29 sees it: Asks the Council and the Commission to implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively. Directive 2006/24/EC is also known as the Data Retention Directive, and permits (nay, compels) states to keep track of all electronic communications, including phone calls, emails and browsing sessions. Describing the stupefying invasion of privacy that its expansion represents as an "early warning system," the European Parliament is currently collecting signatures from MEPs and is nearing the majority it requires to adopt the Declaration. Guess when Google does it, it's a horrible infraction of human rights, but when the EU does it, it's some noble life-saving endeavor. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is convinced that sifting through people's search results will produce concrete crime-reducing results, and Swedish Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom puts together a very good explanation of what Written Declaration 29 entails and why it's such a bad idea. Give it a read, won't ya?
Nextel's Cat Trax phones getting sexual predator location data
Nextel's Cat Trax line of child-tracking phones are about to get an interesting new feature that keeps them updated with addresses of local sexual predators and alerts parents by text, email, or page if the phone enters one of the virtual danger zones, or "geofences." The system, which is part of a $20 monthly subscription service from CATS Communications ($10 for each additional phone), is updated in more-or-less real time thanks to a link with the Family Watchdog national database of registered offenders. This new component of the service was championed by Joe Dawson, a resident of 11-year old murder victim Jessica Lunsford's hometown, and the driving force behind the legislation which bears her name.
