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[Bohandas]

I am one of those few people who have somehow landed in a school without Large cliques of horrible people. It's pretty sweet.

Me too. I think my highschool was actually too large to sustain stable schoolwide cliques. I think the fact that the cheer squad and the football team mutually resented each other (this is true) may have contributed too.

[G-Flex]

What like how it's actually only a small "group" of people who commit suicide over cyberbullying. It's not armies of children jumping off bridges, it's a small group of people.

Okay, fair enough, but bigotry and marginalization against (in this case) homosexual kids is a serious problem that shouldn't be taken lightly and isn't easy for the kids themselves to just grow thicker skin against, especially in areas of the country where it still basically alienates you from society-at-large.

That is true, but what may be easier to learn is that society-at-large is obsolete. The web is its replacement. Local prejudices will no longer affect them if they break their addiction to geographically local friends.

This honestly sounds... really, really pretentious and naive.

First off, "society-at-large" as I used it does not necessarily refer to something geographically-oriented.

Secondly, local culture still matters. People still do, contrary to popular belief, live in the physical world, require physical contact, and interact in-person with people and groups, school being an obvious example. I'm practically an Internet-centric shut-in, and even I comprehend both the value and necessity of being around people in person, whether through work, education, family, or friendships.

Thirdly, prejudices are not limited to geographic localities. The Internet makes it obvious that like-minded people and subcultures are very good at finding each other and forming groups with their own distinct prejudices, social trends, and ideals. On the Internet, you still do need to deal with the prejudices and flaws of certain groups, whether they're defined by geography or not. You get to pick and choose a little more, sure, but nobody is going to surround themselves with naught but people who already think and behave exactly like them and with exactly the same sensibilities. Some people on the Internet try, and join very insular or homogenous communities, but that's not necessarily a healthy or wise thing to do in the first place (part of being a mature and intelligent person is knowing how to deal with people and groups who are dissimilar to you, and the benefits thereof; if everybody only hangs around like-minded people and considers everyone remotely dissimilar the "Other", prejudices get worse, not better, and society suffers).

[sonerohi]

I still don't understand why cyber bullying is a crime, yet regular bullying is not. If I go out to recess and punch little Timmy in the throat until he bleeds, the school calls my parents and I get grounded for a week. If I go on FaceBook and call little Timmy a shithead, I get to go to prison. And since we actively educate kids about the horrors of cyber bullying, they look at the punishment and say "holy shit, I'll just wait til tomorrow and beat the hell out of him. I'm not going to jail". Me, personally, I'd rather take some spiritual hurt than physical hurt, but then again, I haven't ever had it that bad.

[G-Flex]

I still don't understand why cyber bullying is a crime, yet regular bullying is not. If I go out to recess and punch little Timmy in the throat until he bleeds, the school calls my parents and I get grounded for a week. If I go on FaceBook and call little Timmy a shithead, I get to go to prison.

Can you back this up, though? I would hope that any actual legislation cares more about the actual activity than the medium. Obviously, people shouldn't be focusing on cyber-bullying in exclusion to all other varieties of bullying; that's just senseless.

[sonerohi]

Unfortunately, I just have anecdotal stuff from my school district. District 186 of Springfield, Illinois: Where 95% of the teachers are scum and the rest just like summer. My school has a delightful ability to threaten away any non-closeted homosexuals, and some douche bags are getting to work on ridding all of the 'nerds'.

[Bohandas]

I still don't understand why cyber bullying is a crime, yet regular bullying is not. If I go out to recess and punch little Timmy in the throat until he bleeds, the school calls my parents and I get grounded for a week. If I go on FaceBook and call little Timmy a shithead, I get to go to prison. And since we actively educate kids about the horrors of cyber bullying, they look at the punishment and say "holy shit, I'll just wait til tomorrow and beat the hell out of him. I'm not going to jail". Me, personally, I'd rather take some spiritual hurt than physical hurt, but then again, I haven't ever had it that bad.

I believe that this goes by the name of "assault", and it goes unpunished because kids make the mistake of telling parents or teachers instead of going straight to the cops (or better yet, to slimy personal injury lawyers)

[Vector]

... Dude, the guy who won the student body president elections at my (fairly liberal) high school posted on Facebook that they shouldn't vote for the opposition because she's a woman and bleeding once a month is weird.  There was no censure from the school.  It's not like cyber-bullying is very well enforced.


The other thing I'm going to say is that it's ridiculously hard to maintain any sort of safespace on the internet.  Just ask any feminist blog.  There's usually enormous amounts of trolling and douchebaggery that has to be weeded out for it to be usable.

[Bohandas]

... Dude, the guy who won the student body president elections at my (fairly liberal) high school posted on Facebook that they shouldn't vote for the opposition because she's a woman and bleeding once a month is weird. 

Wow, not only was his argument sexist but it was also a complete non-sequiter....

[G-Flex]

... Dude, the guy who won the student body president elections at my (fairly liberal) high school posted on Facebook that they shouldn't vote for the opposition because she's a woman and bleeding once a month is weird.  There was no censure from the school.  It's not like cyber-bullying is very well enforced.

That's one reason people get so panicky about it: When there is a problem, and people do not understand how the problem works or how it happens, then they get afraid. This is one of those cases; those in charge don't have nearly as much of a handle on the Internet as those they're trying to protect (or protect from), so they aren't sure how to deal with it, so they get fearful of it.

[RedKing]

I'm not really qualified to speak on the cyberbullying part, but I am on the cybersecurity part. That's a very REAL threat, and one that has deadly serious implications. There's currently a lot of discussion going on within military and intelligence circles to try and arrive at some defined thresholds of what constitutes a "prank" and what consitutes "an act of war".

Case in point: If a foreign country planted a bomb at an electrical substation which, when detonated, blacked out a large swath of Southern California, causing millions of dollars in economic damage...that's a pretty easily agreed-on act of war.

If a hacker(s) manage the same result with a buffer overflow or DoS attack on the systems managing the electrical grid, and the attack is traceable back to a single country point-of-origin with credible evidence that the government there supports cyberwarfare....then what?

This is being thrown into the forefront lately because of a recent phishing scam which targeted numerous upper-level US government and military officials and was traced to a batch of systems in Jinan province, China. China is known to actively train and maintain cyberwarfare "battalions". There are some who are saying, "Look...this is an active espionage attempt." The problem is in establishing a definitive link that it was:

A. State-ordered. Problematic, because the state could set them up and then give them considerable leeway to cause havoc as they see fit. Think the online equivalent of privateering.

B. That the state would actively profit from any information gained (i.e. even if it was some Chinese script kiddies doing it for the lulz, would they give the PSB any information they got?)

This is damned important because it means that one day, we could be looking at World War III all because some Chinese 4channers thought it would be awesome to troll the Pentagon.  And it's not just China. Israel and Pakistan have had a low-level cyberwar going on for years. It's mostly unfocused and relegated to site defacement and DoS attacks, but don't think for a moment that if things heated up it couldn't get uglier fast.

[G-Flex]

To me, the fact that phishing still apparently works against the US government says something about the state of network security and the average employee's ability to not completely screw over their own company or government by clicking on things. Sad.

[Bdthemag]

I like to imagine that the U.S. Government keeps on getting emails that say "Do you have an extremely large deficit? Do you owe alot of money to other nations? Then click this link and you'll find out the easy steps to get rid of your problems!"

[Zrk2]

I like to imagine that the U.S. Government keeps on getting emails that say "Do you have an extremely large deficit? Do you owe alot of money to other nations? Then click this link and you'll find out the easy steps to get rid of your problems!"

Sigged!

[Tuxman]

I'm going to flaunt my limited knowledge on this topic. In the court case 'Bethel School District v. Fraser' (1983), where a student sued after his school suspended him for giving a speech they considered lewd, the Supreme court ruled that a public school has the right to monitor and control what their students say. Public institutions (schools) are allowed to suppress their students rights to free speech.

(http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/firstamendment/bethel.html)

An excerpt from his speech:

"I know a man who is firm - he's firm in his pants, he's firm in his shirt, his character is firm - but most [of] all, his belief in you the students of Bethel, is firm. Jeff Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in. He drives hard... "

This means that by the United States Justice System, Public Schools (Public Institutions) are allowed to take away their students Free Speech rights. Schooling is mandatory, which means that by being under 18 in the US, you have no rights to free speech during schooling.

However, in a later case 'Morse v. Frederick' (2007), this was contested. A student holding a banner reading "Bong hits for Jesus" off school property was suspended for the content on that banner in a public institution.

(http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/06-278.ZS.html)

The case was between the student (Frederick) and the principal (Morse), and it went to the Ninth Circuit (which is a big deal, while less than Supreme Court), where the court ruled that schools were allowed to control their student's free speech wherever they wanted.

This invalidates any arguments that support Cyber-bullying as free speech. It is also another topic of discussion.

[bumblepuppy]

Making a post for the express purpose of trolling is terrible, even if you intend it to be a joke. I suggest you take a brief vacation from the keyboard.

And:

- Don't confuse piracy with 'competition'.

- The internet itself may be virtual, but the psychological effects of interacting with it are definitely real.

- Just because cyber-bullying does not inflict physical harm the same way a punch on the nose would does not make it all right.