A PRESENTATION BY MOSES HOWE E-Safety from a Youth Point of View

Uses Of Internet There are many different sites that I as a young person use, most of which are networking/ forum based. To help determine where the risks mostly lie, I have gathered the approximate user numbers of the most popular online sites. MSN : 21,000 people online in the space of an hour MYSPACE: 62,837 Hits in one day FACEBOOK: 7,000,000 users since launch in Feb 04 PHOTOBUCKET: 61,000,000 since launch in Feb 03 HI5: 70,000,000 in a year

Where The Risks Lie

The Risks With every technological advance, another risk is made. The two biggest and most difficult to control in my eyes are Bullying, and People pretending to be someone else. For example, I was in a situation were one person was pretending to be many different people on MSN, and found out the answers to me and my friend’s secret question (First pet, first school, ect.) using this information, they reset my password, and used the access to my account to bully most of my contacts, while pretending to be me. Such issues are happening constantly, and I have found myself frequently ‘Back-hacking’ to help people I know re-obtain their accounts on almost all of the previously mentioned sites.

The Methods Breaching public sector firewalls is usually a process that takes a matter of minutes. I have screenshots of a simple firewall hack at Brent council’s children and families building here.here Also, allow me to demonstrate…..

But what can we do? I’m not sure how possible it is, but Messaging and social networking sites should require verifiable details, such as address, and a real name, as I have been told that if someone is using a web messenger on msn, or is using someone else’s computer, they cannot be traced via the report abuse link because the address and name info they give is made up. I’m not sure if this is true, but if it is it is rather worrying Other things that might help are dynamic filter applications in schools and libraries, as the current ones can be breached in a matter of seconds, giving young people access to ‘Social Hacks’ where the user can obtain access to other people’s social networking pages

Final Statement You need to think outside the box! Give us some credit – we know who to avoid. Locking us out sends us underground. Try suggestions rather than rules.