News from around the horn

In honor of the new baseball season (go Sox!), we thought we'd offer something from left field.  Berkman Communications Intern Alex Berengaut shares some interesting news items that you may have missed.

* Myspace.com, the hugely popular on-line haunt of teenagers and (possibly) pedophiles, announced this week that they would be stepping up efforts to forestall sexual predation on the site. Towards this end, the company has hired Microsoft’s child safety czar and promised to increase the visibility on the site of privacy and safety warnings. Blogger Susan Crawford, seeing privacy risks in the new generation of social networking sites, suggests that a broader backlash against the mostly open services will be forthcoming.

* Google has no plans to lobby China to alter its internet censorship policy. Speaking in China to promote its new Google.cn search engine, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, suggested it would be “arrogant” to “tell a country how to run itself” so soon after arrival. Interestingly, the article suggests that Google has avoided providing e-mail or blogging services in China because of discomfort with the obligation to turn over data on cyber-dissidents.

* Investigations into the London and Madrid bombings have revealed that the terrorists involved gleaned both inspiration and know-how from internet websites and bulletin boards. Most worrying for security services is the possibility that a plot could be hatched, planned, and executed by complete strangers with all communication taking place through internet channels.

* A week after it first became possible to register an .eu domain name, the results are in: très bon! More than 300,000  Europeans registered domains with the new suffix, leading EU Commissioner Vivian Reding to hope that it might one day rival the  hegemonic “.com”.

* Dead, but not forgotten (online): Millions of Chinese have chosen to honor their ancestors this Tomb Sweeping Day by sending virtual carnations, leaving memorial messages, and penning online tribute songs. The movement of ancestral commemoration online has been encouraged and applauded  by the Chinese government; the former way to celebrate Tomb Sweeping Day – burning paper money and offering food –has been deemed to be an environmental hazard.