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Pet Adoption Web Site Created by 6th-Grader

by Will Safer, posted Feb 25th 2008 at 3:05PM

Pet adoption Web site.

A Maryland sixth grader has combined her interest in animals with a healthy dollop of Web-page-building skills to build a site that matches cats, dogs and other animals that need homes with people who are looking to adopt the furry friends.

Eleven-year-old Jennie Lupkin of Ijamsville, Md., went from matching pets at a local animal shelter with people placing requests on Craigslist but soon went well beyond, creating the site "Helping Animals One At A Time" (www.freewebs.com/frederickanimalcontrol/).

Lupkin -- who has a bichon frise dog, a hermit crab, two birds and fish -- posts pictures of cats, dogs and other animals that are waiting for adoption at the local animal shelter. The site includes highlights of pets in need of homes and encourages people to volunteer at local animal shelters. It also features a page where site visitors can leave comments. So far, response has been on the positive side.

Besides Lupkin getting lots of attention for her age, the site stakes a claim to perhaps a new type of matchmaking Web site, in the spirit of dating sites like Match.com or Jdate.com.

Everyone is looking for companionship. Maybe a little furry friend is in your future?

From Examiner.com.

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6th Grader Gets $6.5m to Fund Game Company

by Tom Conlon, posted Sep 20th 2007 at 11:19AM

6th Grader's Game Company Gets $6.5m in Funding At 12 years old, most of us could barely raise our textbook-filled backpacks, never mind $6.5 million in funding. But that's exactly what Silicon Valley 6th grader Arjun Mehta has done. Way back when he was in 5th grade (last year), Mehta started PlaySpan in the family garage. PlaySpan is a service that works with gaming companies to sell virtual goods inside of their online worlds -- rather fitting since the money to start PlaySpan came from the sale of virtual items Mehta had won by finishing quests in various games. Though the company has yet to launch, it claims to have already signed up seven game companies as customers.

The new influx of cash from Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures and other investors in Asia brings with it some new playmates for Mehta in the form of new board members from the aforementioned companies.

It's not yet clear whether PlaySpan's new offices will be located in a tree house or a fort.

From Tech Crunch

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MySpace Asked to Identify Sex Offenders

by Tom Conlon, posted May 15th 2007 at 9:22AM

MySpace Asked to Identify Sex OffendersThe attorneys general of North Carolina, Connecticut, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania have issued a letter to MySpace asking the social networking giant to supply a list of the registered sex offenders who use the site. According to a statement by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, the demand comes after law enforcement agencies in those states identified 200 cases of kids being "lured out of their home by predators they met on MySpace."

Unlike public chat rooms that can be patrolled by the fuzz, MySpace allows direct and private contact between predators and potential victims, making them harder to catch.

Unfortunately, when asked to turn over sex offenders in the past, MySpace has claimed that producing such a list would be impossible until there is national legislation requiring busted pervs to register all of their e-mail addresses. According to a Wired article from last year, however, this claim isn't entirely true. With no assistance from MySpace, Wired's reporter ran a program that compared MySpace members against a list of sex offenders in 46 states. The program was able to identify 744 confirmed sex offenders with profiles on the site.

Hopefully, this letter from the states will convince MySpace to clock a little overtime for the safety of its younger users.

From Newsvine

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Rising Online Child Abuse Complaints

by Tom Conlon, posted Apr 18th 2007 at 8:30AM

Rising Online Child Abuse Complaints
According to its 2006 numbers, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is reporting a 34-percent increase in online child abuse complaints since 2005. Though some of the increase is due in part to greater awareness of the IWF itself, the report also points to newer methods being employed by illegal sites for avoiding detection or legal action. One such method involves cutting up pornographic images into several smaller, seemingly innocuous images, and hosting them on various servers all over the world, only to piece them back together on a Web page. Another method is to frequently relocate servers to foreign countries -- a tact that has helped one scofflaw site stay online despite 224 complaints since 2002.

The report also identifies the United States as the country of origin for a majority of the Web sites the IWF received complaints about: nearly 55 percent. Russia was number two with more than 28 percent.

From BBC News
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