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CBS4.com has an excellent article on tips to help prevent online sex crimes from happening.

They talk to Nancy McBride, the national safety director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In addition to ‘just be a good parent’, they give a few other tips as well:

-Use online filters and software to keep your kids away from certain websites.

-Check your child’s web page every once in a while to make sure there’s nothing personal or provocative on it.

-And always check out the people who have access to your children whether online or in their day to day lives.

So you’re keeping a close eye on your teen, but it doesn’t do much good if you don’t know “WTF” they’re saying.

In reference to drugs, CBS News has a good article on the slang teens are using these days.

A few examples:

“Dexing” - Abusing cough syrup (also referred to as “robotripping” and “robodosing”)

“Special K” - A medication used as an anesthetic in humans and animals, ketamine is sometimes abused as a “club drug.” It can cause hallucinations and euphoria in higher doses. Synonyms include vitamin K, breakfast cereal, cat valium, horse tranquilizer, K, Ket, new ecstasy, psychedelic heroin, and super acid.

“Crank” - The stimulant methamphetamine. Synonyms include meth, speed, chalk, white cross, fire, and glass.

“Crunk” - This means to get high and drunk at the same time.

“Antifreeze” - Heroin. Synonyms include Big H, brown sugar, dope, golden girls, H, horse, junk, poison, skag, smack, sweet dreams, tar, and train.

“Snow” - Cocaine. Synonyms include Charlie, crack, coke, dust, flake, freebase, lady, nose candy, powder, rock, rails, snowbirds, toot, white, and yahoo.

“X” - Ecstasy or 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). Synonyms include Adam, E, bean, clarity, essence, lovers speed, MDMA, roll, stacy, XTC.

“Candy flipping” - Refers to a high that’s achieved by combining LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) or acid with ecstasy.

Found this on digg - A chilling compilation of potential privacy exploitations. Definitely makes you think twice before filling in all of your facebook profile information. Some of the connections they make are a little far fetched, but it gives you an idea of what could potentially happen to your personal information.

Check out the disturbing flash movie and then digg the story.

A recent InSafe survey shows that a whopping 57% of all teens post private, sensitive information on their MySpace and Bebo profiles. Of those teens, 33% of them didn’t even know if their profiles were public or private.

Kids under 10 years old were the most oblivious to privacy issues. Privacy awareness increased for kids 10 to 13 years old, and steadily decreased for teens 14-18.

Parents: The best thing you can do is to have a talk with your kids, and it’s never too early to have that conversation … unless your child is really, really young. Once they start using the computer, it’s best to set some ground rules and use monitoring software to keep an eye on them.

A quick Google search brings up some helpful tips from Microsoft: A Parent’s Guide to Online Safety. All ages from 2 to 17 are covered.

Monitoring software is an important tool for any parent.  Since it is near impossible to keep a constant look over the shoulder, software can be your “digital eye” that allows you to keep an eye on your kids even when you’re not around.  One county sheriff is spreading the word, and some free software:

 A new computer software offered to parents for free might make it easier to better monitor and possibly prevent sex crimes and cyber-bullying against children, law enforcement officials said.

ComputerCOP, a monitoring software distributed by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s office scours a computer’s hard drive — searching for every photo, e-mail, web activity, Internet chat log and more than 1,000 buzzwords, like “sex,” — every time a child logs onto the computer.

The Sheriff’s office will distribute 43,000 copies of the software, which cost about $127,000 and was paid for using money seized from drug dealers and money launderers, DeMarco said.

“It’s not enough anymore to put computers in high traffic areas,” said Laura Ahearn of Parent’s for Megans Law. “What we’re saying is violate their privacy, look over their shoulders, read their IM’s, check their Web browsers.”

Check out the full article here.

The standard schoolyard bullying that most of us experienced at some point growing up is being replaced by a new form of torment: Cyberbullying.

From the article:

According to statistics, more than a third of American teenagers who use instant messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, Xanga and Friendster fall victim to electronic insults, often by schoolmates.

The phenomenon has even provoked suicides. In 2005, a 15-year-old boy named Jeff killed himself in the southern state of Florida after being harassed for two years on the Internet by other teenagers.

Another 13-year-old boy from the northeast state of Vermont, Ryan Halligan, committed suicide in 2003. Halligan, who suffered from a slight handicap, had become the butt of jokes on the Internet by several girls.

The article also goes on to mention that while classic schoolyard bullying mainly involved boys, girls are actually slightly bigger perpetrators of cyberbullying than boys.

Fortunately, there are ways for parents to get help in dealing with cyberbullies. Cyberbully.org is a good place to start. They have an excellent guide (PDF) to cyberbullying as well.

According to a recent Pew Internet survey, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook are all the rage. A full two thirds of all teens have at the very least created an online profile.

Of those two thirds of all teens, nearly half are between the ages of 12 and 14 years old, which means a large percentage of kids are lying about their age to sign up on these sites, since most require a minimum age of 14 to sign up.

If you’re interested, you can view the press release that summarizes the survey, or you can view the entire survey in PDF format.

FYI, the survey took place between October 23 and November 19th 2006, so you can rest assured the numbers, if taken again today, would be higher than they were just 3 months ago.

Parents are still trying to figure out what this “My Space” thing is.

If you have a child, he or she has probably been on MySpace. Kim Reyes of Milwaukee heard her kids talk about MySpace so she and a group of parents went online to see what all the fuss was about.

“We had one parent, who went on MySpace and looked and saw a child they knew, and she wasn’t the age she said she was, and there was some pretty provocative photos on there,” said Reyes.

“This is even in your own home now, that kids can get into a lot of trouble. They don’t even need to leave the house anymore, they just have to crank into the computer.”

View the full article here.