this forum is built on distinctly oppressive limestone brother, i can feel it too.

I agree with you boo boo and it used to really bother me but now I just let it pass because I know that people who have to resort to personally attacking others in that kind of way obviously have self-perception and security issues themselves. With sites like YouTube you know that 90% of the population are absolute idiots so I don't attach any merit to their comments but instead realise that they don't have anything better to do and so their acts are very sad.

What does bother me though, is cyber-bullying, which happens so much in both high schools and primary schools now that it sickens me. Not only to people like being 'anonymous' and behind a mask, knowing that they won't be found out, but cyber-bullying can be so much deadlier and detrimental. I've seen private photographs unknowingly been emailed out to thousands of people, email addresses hacked, fake Facebook pages made, you name it. And it's one of those things that you just have no idea where to begin in order to tackle it.

Educate kids in school on how to use the Internet responsibly before they shoot themselves in the foot with it. How's that for a place to begin?

Even if you educate kids on how to use the Internet responsibly it's not going to stop cyber bullying. Bullies don't exactly stop to think, "Oh wait, this isn't responsible."

Does he mean educate those who might fall victim to a cyger-bullies?

Of course not, but most people are woefully naive about the risks they take in putting personal information online, and how to properly protect such information. There's always going to be malicious/predatory jackasses out there, but our schools could do a whole lot more to reduce the harm they cause than what they currently do.

Yeah, I guess. But every school over here has very stringent internet education and cyber bullying is still a prevalent issue. It's not a whole lot about personal information access, but more about bullies targeting other children over the internet because it's a lot easier to bully someone over the net.

I really don't know anything about the nature and prevalence of cyber bullying, or what sort of Internet education you guys have, so I can't really comment further on it. It just seems to me from observation that a whole lot of people set themselves up for disaster when they don't need to. A great illustration of that is Please Rob Me, a site that until recently was crawling people's twitter feeds and publishing the ones where people mentioned that they had just left their homes, in order to shed light on the pandemic of irresponsibility among Twitter users.