Korean child ’starves as parents raise virtual baby’

A South Korean couple who were addicted to the internet let their three-month-old baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online, police said. The pair fed their own premature baby just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at an internet cafe, the official Yonhap news agency reported.

Police officer Chung Jin-won told Yonhap they “lost their will to live a normal life” after losing their jobs. He said they “indulged themselves online” to escape from reality. The 41-year-old father and his 25-year-old wife were arrested in the city of Suweon, south of Seoul, earlier this week, five months after they reported the death of their baby.

An autopsy showed her death was caused by a long period of malnutrition. The couple had become obsessed with nurturing a virtual girl called Anima in the popular role-playing game Prius Online, police said on Friday.

The game enables players to interact with Anima and as they do so, help her to recover her lost memory and develop emotions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8551122.stm

Fake drug scam hijacks UK college websites

UK academic institutions have unwittingly become the accomplices of criminals selling fake drugs online as a security firm has discovered many organisations using the .ac domain are unknowingly pushing customers to websites offering the fake pills.

The scam exploits software flaws to piggyback on the computing resources of the colleges and universities. Researchers at security company Imperva believe “thousands” of organisations may have fallen victim.

In most cases, said Mr Shulman, the spammers have exploited vulnerabilities in a widely used technology called PHP. Many organisations use this technology to make websites more interactive.The injected code included search terms associated with drugs such as Viagra, Cialis and many others. Also included was code that spotted when a visitor arrived at a compromised site from Google.

When combined, the code meant that when a person searched for in the drugs online, the universities and colleges web addresses would pop up in the top results. Anyone clicking on the link would then be re-directed to a fake pharmacy peddling counterfeit pills.

At all other times a visitor would get through to the proper site. Typing in a web address would also lead straight to the real site.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8550219.stm

Coming to a screen near you: an online tutor

The Telegraph reports on the world of online tutoring, where teachers can communicate with students on a global basis using webcams and microphones.

“I know that parents throw up their hands at the mention of today’s screen culture,” says Will Orr-Ewing, founder of upmarket Keystone Tutors. “The truth is, though, that children feel it’s far less of a chore to sit down in front of a computer than it is to sit down in front of a pile of books. And if anything, an online teaching session is more structured than a face-to-face situation, because only one person can speak at a time.” That’s because spoken communication comes down the computer phone-line hook-up known as Skype (free of charge). Meanwhile, written communication takes place on the computer screen; both tutor and pupil can write or draw on a computer-screen “whiteboard”, which performs the function of a shared blackboard, suspended in cyberspace.

So what do parents think of online tutoring? “I was very impressed,” says father of four Nicholas Wright, from Bexley, in Kent, who has used Home Tutoring Online for two of his children. “From our point of view, we didn’t have to keep taking the children to and from the tutor’s house,” Wright says. “We also got regular, detailed reports on how the children were progressing. With a real tutor, you only ever get rather vague feedback.

“Results-wise, the tutoring got our son up from a C in maths GCSE to a B, which is what he needed if he was going to achieve his ambition of doing maths at A-level.”

“It’s a matter of quality control,” says Helen Spiegelberg, of Greater London Tutors. “Our tutors are CRB [Criminal Records Bureau} checked, and have all attended our compulsory training seminar.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/7361509/Coming-to-a-screen-near-you-an-online-tutor.html