Busy school holidays: Quicklinks

• The CEO of GM has announced that Peak Oil is here and that the age of the petrol car is coming to an end. More at Greensblog.
• Meanwhile India announces a 1-Lakh car, the Tata Nano: will this ultimately improve the environment of India by being less polluting than the other vehicles around, or will it merely add to the pollutant overload? Robert Merkel weighs the issues at LP.
• Barista quotes Geoffrey Atherden on the importance of subsidising elite performers in all walks, not just sport.
  Image Source: SMH via Barista
• This is one I meant to cover at more length, but I only have time to be brief. I blogged last year on the suicide of a young American girl who was cyberbullied via a fake MySpace profile. (Darlene on LP in Exile covered the defensiveness of the bullies and the public outrage.) No charges were laid against the woman who created the fake profile in her home state of Missouri (although the police appeared to want to if they only had an appropriate statute), but now it appears that California, where MySpace is headquartered, is considering charging her with cyberfraud for creating a fake profile.

  Much as I loathe what the woman did, this is definitely cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer: certainly there was deception involved, but not all deception is fraud, which has a very precise definition – using false representations to induce another person to “part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right”. MySpace, which offers accounts for free, cannot have been defrauded by this woman. Young Megan Meiers was deceived by this woman, but even though she ended taking her own life, life is not legally defined as a valuable thing or a legal right. Cyberfraud is simply not an appropriate charge.

  Such a charge has huge, chilling implications for one of the foundations of Internet interaction – privacy, based on the ability to create an alternate persona for oneself online. Sure, most people use net pseudonyms for relatively trivial reasons, but what about genuine whistleblowers who rely on anonymity? What about people who simply don’t want their online activities to come to the notice of their family and neighbours, for whatever reasons? Say, a gay teenager who hasn’t outed him or herself to parents? Or a woman from a conservative religious background considering an abortion? I’m sure you can think of many more examples of people whose ability to seek companionship, advice, activism or justice online will be considerably hampered if there are blocks placed to posting pseudonymously/anonymously.

• And for something completely different: a delightfully complicated music score.

Similar Posts:

• She did not feel as guilty because at the funeral she found out the girl had tried to commit suicide before by tigtog
• A few questions for Hoydenizens by Guest Hoyden
• Having “the right” to do something does not make the act immune to criticism by tigtog
• Alternative Youth Music Station Thinks There’s No Alternative to Being a Bloke by Guest Hoyden
• What goes around comes around: sins of the fathers division by tigtog

Tagged as: alternate persona, cyberbullying, cyberfraud, false representations, internet interaction, linkfest, moral panics, music, peak oil, petrol car, privacy, public outrage, subsidising performers