News bytes
British newspaper helps trap online predator
The News of the World recently undertook an operation to trap a paedophile who was using the web to groom a 13 year old girl.
Sameer Jusab, 30, bombarded the girl with inappropriate and explicit messages in a chatroom called No Adults. Jusab thought he was speaking to Karene, a vulnerable schoolgirl, but it was actually an undercover reporter from the newspaper.
The evidence was passed straight to child protection officers and Jusab was hauled before the courts. A judge at the town’s crown court ordered he join a sex offenders’ re-education group as part of a three-year community order and banned him from using the internet or working with children under 16 for five years.
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/880300/News-of-the-World-victory-We-nail-pervert-on-web.html
China may shut porn fiction websites
China’s press watchdog has threatened to shut down more than 120 websites offering pornographic fiction, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday. An official with the General Administration of Press and Publication said websites which failed to remove the content would be taken offline.
The crackdown comes as China continues to tighten control over its booming Internet sector. Since the second half of last year, it has introduced new regulations on online pornography.
Late last year China cracked down on mobile websites offering pornography downloads and more recently it barred online game companies from using lewd marketing tactics to attract users.
Using computers to teach children with no teachers
A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, a conference has heard.
Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999. He has watched the children teach themselves – and others – how to use the machines and gather information. Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.
“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
Professor Mitra’s work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum.
“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”
To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet. “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”
He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills. One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.
“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said. His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.
In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.
“No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” said Prof Mitra, who now works at Newcastle University in the UK.
Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10663353
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