This is what the specialists are saying about kids with gaming problems. `..more we work with these kids, less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem.` So says Keith Bakker the founder and head of Europe’s first and only clinic to treat gaming addicts.

Parents and teachers to blame
For Mr Bakker the root cause of the huge growth in excessive gaming lies with parents who have failed in their duty of care. 87% of online gamers are over the age of 18. From that age, help is something they need to seek for themselves, because as you know parents no longer have the legal right to intervene.

For those who are younger, intervention may be the only solution. That means even sometimes literally taking a child away from a computer, removing them from the game for a period of time until they begin to see there are other choices. If parents aren`t there for them, they are more likely to isolate themselves in virtual worlds.

“This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”

At least 10 hours a day playing
George [not his real name] is an 18-year-old gamer being treated at the Keith Bakker`s clinic in Amsterdam. He was spending at least 10 hours a day playing Call of Duty 4 until he sought help at the centre.
“Call of Duty was somewhere I felt accepted for the first time in my life,” he says. “I was never helped by my parents or my school. At the clinic I also feel accepted and have come out of myself.”
Read more about George`s case, here.

More posts about this issue in blogoshere.

All of the Sherlock Holmes stories are great, even if they seem far-fetched at times, and many social and moral issues emerge in the stories. He was famous for his intellectual prowess, and is renowned for his skillful use of “deductive reasoning” and great observation to solve difficult cases.

But as we are no more in eighteen century and Sherlock Holmes is not here to solve any case our generation must do it by his own. Anyway it’s hard to imagine Holmes spying hackers, solving an e-crime and catching spam attackers. Things have moved forward and the global information society is rapidly evolving among with the cyberspace that has opened the door to criminals of all sorts.

Nowadays Internet and computers can lead to committing crime, online thievery, spam attacks, different online attacks, and human trafficking. But on the other side they can also provide essential evidence of all these online crimes. Electronic records such as computer network logs, e-mails, word-processing files, and picture files increasingly provide important evidence on e-crime cases, online thievery, hackers attack and any other offensive cyber activity.

Different services, associations (http://www.ophea.net/cybercops.cfm) and specific software were developed and created in order to eliminate the online threats and to assure a safe browsing and a secure online environment. There are programs specifically created for educating children about risks and safety issues associated with Internet use (http://www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/children/). If you want to learn more on how to protect your child online, if you are looking for proper websites for children or you want to report cyber and IP crime than please find below some resources in order to find a solution and get you a helping hand:
http://www.cybercrime.gov/reporting.htm
http://www.kidsites.com/
http://applicationblocker.com/child-abuse-statistics.html

And as a proper ending for this post I found the right Holmes’ saying: “The cardinal rule of criminal detection was carved in stone more than a century ago.] It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence, … It biases the judgment.”

Our site was attacked due to lacks in our servers security. Because of the nature of the attack, we were spotted ourselves as an attack site, so especially Mozilla users and those who have some special security settings, are seeing warning messages when they try to access our pages.

However, Internet Explorer users can access without any constrains/messages our site. Thank you for your understanding, as we promise that we will take action so we won`t have any of this problems again.

In time, we encountered/read about all kind of harassment cases. Whether it was about public harassment (similar to sexual harassment, except that consist in the fact that this type of harassment is carried out in public places - as the name and say), harassment at work or verbal harassment via telephone, these regrettably facts are taking place every day.

A new form of harassment seems to be introduced in our daily life: online harassment. A movie star from South Korea committed suicide because of the pressures and malicious comments that appeared systematically about her, online.
The actress was found dead in apartment or on Oct. 2. Police investigations conclusions were that she took her life because of the humiliation that she felt because of all online posting about her.
This tragedy revealed many such cases of suicides caused by harassment in the Cyberspace.

Cyberstalkers (as they were named) use a variety of techniques to harass their victims, including sending hostile e-mails, publishing falsehoods about them in chat rooms and Usenet postings and even posing as the victims in provocative Internet communications and e-mail messages to others.

And the cyberstalking problem appears to be getting worse, experts say. The cyberstalking phenomenon appears to be part of a “migration” of traditional crimes – including threats, child pornography, fraud, gambling and extortion — from the physical to the online world.

Many cases involve ex-spouses, former lovers or estranged relatives, but some cyberstalkers are strangers who have simply taken a dislike to their victims for some reason.

Below you can find 2007 Statistics about online harassment.

Age of Victim 18-30 28% 31-40 24% 41+ 29% Unk 19%
Gender of Victim Female 61% Male 21% Unk 18%
Gender of Harasser Male 39% Female 30% Unk 31%
Prior relationship with harasser? No 56% Yes 44%
If yes, what was the relationship? Ex 31% Online Acq 27% Friend 14% Family 13% Work 7% Roommate 3% Customer 3% School 1% Co-owner 1%
Were there threats of offline/physical violence? Yes 24%
Did victim report the harassment? Yes 59% No 41%
Source: WHO@

However we didn’t found any data here about those under 18 years harassed online. Maybe the parents reported for them, or maybe they didn’t tell anyone about what happened. Anyhow, more and more organizations publish online guides about privacy and online threats. You can find them at a simple web search.

If you notice any changes in your child’s behavior or you just suspect that his online activity can threat his safety, take action. Also if you suspect some of your online activities, take action. Let’s make sure that online harassment meets his fall.

Dear parents, I know that the posts and news these days were all about Halloween, pumpkins, making costumes for children and what food specialties can be cooked.
Well I’m here to give you a helping hand and provide you some resources that seemed interesting for me. For costumes ideas, creepy outdoor decors and Halloween party games I advice you to visit http://holidays.kaboose.com/halloween/.
For those who want to create themselves a costume I found a great guide with a step by step explanation for the making process.

If you have not found what you need than I guess a simple Google search will help you. But please be aware because recent searches using the keywords “Halloween costumes” might turn up some compromised websites. When a web user searches those terms, the legitimate but compromised website will return a high ranking and the user will be more likely to visit there. The infected site contains malicious JavaScript that will redirect users to another site without their knowing. So take care what web sites you visit.

I still have one question: Trick or Treat?

This is one of the statements psychiatrist Arlene Kalman made on the latest Wellgate for Women press release. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Wellgate for Women, ninety-six percent of women who work in an office claim to like or love their computer, with the average woman spending nearly triple the amount of time daily with her computer than she spends with her significant other (9.3 hours compared to 3.6 hours).
(You can read the press release here )

What we find interesting is that when it comes to our closest friends, usually the woman is the one who blames the husband for spending more time with the computer…not mentioning the time spent at the computer during working hours.
So, starting from this topic we conducted an internal survey at our offices. This is what we found out

100% claimed that men spend more time at the computer at home. Two thirds claimed that women are more addicted to specific topics (tabloids, shopping, music, etc) then men. All agreed that a woman can stay longer without a computer.
We conducted this instant survey in all offices from the building and we asked simple questions like `At home, who spends more time at the computer, you or your husband/wife?`, `Which one of you is more addicted?` and other polemics which can`t be reproduced here

In the end, what is the truth? Do women spend more time on the computer instead of their families? Or the men are `the main subject` in this issue?

What do you say? How is it at your home/close friends?

I was talking with a friend whose husband has a problem with online gambling. He goes at work every morning, he’s a normal man, doesn’t have any other bad habits, at least she said it :). But he likes to visit online gambling sites and have some gambling software installed on his computer. My friend was worried that their 8 years boy could access them through her husband’s account.

Then, when I was doing some research for today’s article I thought that this issue could be good to discuss about it. And so I discovered that there are parents really concerned about their children activity on gaming and gambling sites.

Many kids use the Internet to play online games. But often when you use search engines to find game sites, you also find gambling sites. Banner ads and pop-ups for casinos are everywhere on the Web. While games sites are free and usually feature card, arcade, puzzle game types with automatic tracking and scoring, gambling sites involve winning or losing actual money.

Due to the nature of Internet, online gambling sites cannot physically check a visitor’s age or prevent them from accessing the site.
However after reading several online releases and visiting online gambling sites (yes I did that to see how `easy` can you sign up), we’ve come up with a list of things that us, as parents, can do to protect our children from online gambling risks.

1. Check where the kids are going online and what they’re doing;
2. Establish rules about what games they can play;
3. Remind them that it is illegal to gamble and explain them how usually gambling works and that it can be addictive;
4. Make sure you check every time they ask you about your credit card number or other personal/financial data;
5. If you use these kind of software, make sure you don’t use the `save password` feature;
6. Create separate profiles for children on your home PCs;
7. Use parental control software.

It is well known that Internet pornography is something that we should keep our children well aware and away from. Internet pornography sites should only be accessible to adults, yet it is increasingly and increasingly easier for children to log in to a high-speed Internet connection from anywhere – school, libraries, coffee shops, home – and view these types of websites.

With the expansion of Internet websites like Myspace and Facebook, we saw the birth of social media where users can connect and chat with each other on an easy to customize homepage of their own. Social media has been taken even further, though. Microblogging platforms like Twitter and Pownce have been developed. These allow Internet surfers to create an account and send small messages to friends and followers. However, some of these microblogging platforms have gone sour due to Internet pornography. And children are susceptible to these issues as they are some of the most frequent visitors to these sites.

Children can use microblogging to send messages and short ideas to anyone who might be following them. In some cases, some of these followers might be spamming webmasters who use social media and microblogging networks to spam their porn websites out to thousands of people. Children can thusly be affected by these incoming messages, and view pornography from a website that should have been protected from these sorts of activities.

Because these microblogging platforms now seem incapable of protecting our children from Internet pornography and other types of spam, the responsibility is now on us, the adults, to teach our children what they should do if they ever encounter unexpected pornography on the Internet. As a suggestion, we think you should talk to your children about how you can better protect them face to face. This can give a child an increased sensation of self-management and help them make their own, proper decisions on what websites they choose to affect their own lives.

Unfortunately, man hasn’t been known to be the most faithful and trustworthy being on this planet. In fact, it is believed that nearly 50% of all couples have cheated or thought about cheating on their “better half.” The last thing you would want to know is that your husband or wife has been cheating on you for the past several months. As soon as you notice the warning signs that your spouse might be cheating on you, you should begin actively investigating the issue.

Warning signs that you might have a cheater on your hands can come in many forms. Is your spouse constantly coming home from work late? True, they might have had to put in a couple extra hours to finish up a hard task, but more than a few times a month may be pushing it. Also, do they leave the house and don’t invite or allow you to go frequently? These are both good warning signs that could let you know your spouse isn’t faithful.

Another good way to catch a cheating spouse is to know what they are doing on their personal computer. There are thousands of websites that allow you to meet and flirt with other people. If he or she is seen viewing these with an active profile, you’ll know the moment you see it that they might not be the right person for you. Programs and software can be installed on your computer that let you know what they have been typing and what their emails say. These can help you catch a cheater.

So what should you do when you catch your spouse being unfaithful to you? That decision should be left entirely up to you; however, many will tell you if it happens once, it will happen again. If they do attempt to find some action on the side again, you can be sure they will hide their tracks much better.

The Twitter start-up was an amazing thing to watch. In a matter of months, tech junkies and Internet fans crowded the webs and added a new word to our vocabulary – microblogging. Microblogging is similar to a blog in that you can write anything and everything that you want, but as with Twitter’s microblogging system, you are limited to only 120 characters to write with per post. Twitter users can send tweets to one another sharing links, replying to conversations, and finding more people to follow and listen in on what they are writing.

However, lately Twitter has been getting some very malicious users on its microblogging platform. On a day to day basis, more spam users are signing up just to try to get traffic to their websites. Many of these websites contain pornographic images and other adult content. Being that Twitter is supposed to be family-friendly, and a non-pornographic community for all ages, you can see that Twitter has its problems.

When these spammers log on to their account, they’ll usually start by adding an attractive woman’s picture and automate the addition of friends using scripts and other hacks. Unknowing Twitter users will sometimes check out that spammer’s profile and follow that user. When the spammer sends out a tweet, it will contain a link to their pornographic website. Children especially may end up clicking on these links.

Twitter isn’t supposed to be a dangerous website, but if Twitter can’t find a way to block this type of spamming activity, we could see a load of lawsuits headed their way. Their policies are supposed to protect children from adult content, yet every day, more and more adult content spammers are unleashing their wraths on Twitter and its users. If Twitter is a part of your daily web activities, then find a way to protect yourself from these spammers. Only add people you know and trust, and don’t accept adds from strangers. Also, teach your children the importance of staying safe online.