CYBER SQUATTING...

WHAT? Cyber squatting-learn your lingo. So often you have been told to NOT go to whitehouse.com. (Yikes-hope this doesn't snapshot!!!) Anyway-when a hacker/spammer tricks people into visiting a website that mimics the REAL URL of a site-it is called cybersquatting. Usually the wrong site is pretty obscene. Goggle.com is another-and then once you get there-they make it difficult to click off of these and leave. They also charge obscene amounts of money to the sites they are mimicking to own the URL. There is actual legislation against cyber-squatters....hmmm we sure have come a long way. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property00/domain/legislation.html

Yikes...who would have thought....

95% of parents didn't recognize the lingo kids use to let people know that their parents are watching
89% of sexual solicitations are made in either chat rooms or Instant Messages
20% of children age 10-17 have received unwanted sexual solicitations online; that's one out of every five kids
75% of youth who received an online sexual solicitation did not tell a parent
81% of parents of online youth say that kids aren't careful enough when giving out information about themselves online
76% of parents don't have rules about what their kids can do on the computer
65% of parents believe that kids do things online that they wouldn't want their parents to know about
4,000,000 children are posting content to the Web everyday
15,000,000 youth use Instant Messaging

Much more info @netlingo.com

Do you know your LINGO?

Have you intercepted a note from your students that ended with WB or BFF...these acronyms of olden days have now turned into the newest NET LINGO....with a twist. Net lingo are all of the short cuts to words that kids now use to type, instant message, and text each other with.

So why do you need to know this? POS does not mean what you might think-it means Parent Over Shoulder. TOS-Teacher over shoulder. BTW-By the way. BBL-Be back later. Kids use these in their notes, texts and in their everyday language. Haven't you seen the Cingular commercial for text messaging rates and the BFF Jill?

Regardless...even though some of these are innocent, some are not. There is a lot of net lingo out there that is very cryptic. Be forewarned-some of it is EXPLICIT in nature. Click here if you are interested in educating yourself more... NoSlang OR....netlingo.