Blog #22

The article I would like to summarize is "How safe is MySpace" by Hilary Hylton. This article is about how underage age teens are abusing MySpace and lying about the age or randomly finding a guy to hook up with. An example of this is a nineteen year old guy named Pete was arrested for having sex with a fourteen year old girl. The girl bumped her age up a year and Pete posed as a high school senior. Pete is now suing MySpace and seeking thirty million dollars in damages. Another example is a sixteen year old honor student in Michigan flew as far to Jordan before her parents realized she was planning to rendezvous with and marry a West Bank man she had met on MySpace. Parents are now wondering what kind of liaisons their kids are forging online. Law inforcement agencies and elected officials are now stepping up their efforts to get teen laden networking sites to improve their safety measures. But is this enough and who is to blame the parents, MySpace, or the actual users of these networking sites? I think that all of them are to blame. Parents should be able and have talks with their kids more often and explain to them the dangers of these sites, and if they have a computer at home make sure you lock up the computer with passwords and such. Of course you are not going to be around your kid twenty four hours a day. As for networking sites they should find new programs which allow to check if they are that actual person and verify the age of the users. As for Pete suing MySpace for thirty million dollars, does he deserve the money? No. He lied to that girl the same way he had been lied to. He deserves to go to jail for thirty million years for all I care.
The next article I would like to summarize is called "MySpace Launches a Free Music Revolution" by Josh Quittner. This article talks about how MySpace is allowing users to instantly gain access to a vast library of songs. While other sites such as Rhapsody allow you all the songs you want, but for $12.99 a month. MySpace music is free and has linked deal with four major label, plus the five million artists who already have pages on the site. I am pretty sure that Rhapsody or iTunes is not happy with MySpace music, and will most definitely try to get MySpace to stop letting listeners listen to music for free. So are Rhapsody and iTunes days numbered? Who knows only time can tell.