The Internet in the media

Last night I was sat watching an episode of Law & Order, the story was covering a young boy who was a little too obsessed with sex. The child's lawyer in the story was arguing that the child had been exposed to pornography on the internet, it was easily accessible and that it was similar to putting a child in a swimming pool without first allowing them to swim.

I am always angered by the medias irresponsible representation of the internet in films, TV and news. These corporations are all desperately scrambling to get a sizable online presence, they're all trying to get their shows online so you don't miss them. They fail to put any safeguards into this programming, there is no age checking like sites such as Gametrailers have in place. Even if you can lie, at least it's a step in the right direction to teaching them that they SHOULDN'T be looking at something.

The media portrays the internet to be this huge web of depravity, where children go and are corrupted or stalked by predators. This can happen in our schools, churches even our streets, but the internet is a big bad world. They never tell you that the child really has to be looking for this stuff, that the individual using the computer doesn't just sign on and find instant "corruption". Chat rooms don't exist in the format they once did, programs provide parents with a lot of control.

The internet has not evolved at a pace too quick for people to catch up and fully understand what they are giving to children. I've heard that recently. But the internet in it's current form, more precisely the World Wide Web, has been around for 15 years or more, it's been coming and people have not learnt enough to protect their child. Horror stories breed fear, and it angers and worries me that people will take "Child is addicted to sex, and can get it on the internet" to mean "Child has been corrupted by the internet".

The internet is a place where you can meet people, sure. The internet is a place where you can voice an opinion (like the one I'm voicing right now), sure. The internet is a place where you can find bad things, sure. But I can walk down the street to the supermarket, I can meet people, voice an opinion and find bad things! The internet actually makes it MORE difficult to be harmed. You have a choice of when you read, when you voice and what you see. It's a place where I can find out things that might take me months to find otherwise, it's a place where I can buy things, meet people, talk to people, stay in touch with people.

Progress, at last!

So, I've been doing a lot of programming recently. My PHP5 system is coming along nicely, now having cookies and forms in place. That's still a long way off though I'm working at it a little every day.

I had some fun recently with a project for an online friend developing a user login system that offered the ability for permissions based access. What I ended up with wasn't quite the dynamic system I had hoped for, but it did give me some ideas for going forward with the framework and it worked perfectly for the site. What I was trying to avoid was putting flags into the user to say what they could couldn't do. Instead I assigned them a role, and from there I can take what they can/can't do (as per the other days post)

I learnt some other valuable lessons, mainly that htaccess files in subdirectories are very difficult to work with, and in the end had to resort to good old query strings in the URL as opposed to nice neat URL rewriting. I also learnt that cookies are tough when the host has magic_quotes_gpc( ) turned on in PHP. That's something I've got to learn a lot more about. Thanks to Vega on HTML Forums for the assistance and the information I need to read up on.

I also hit another challenge, how to accurately represent a championship table on MortonGolf. I have the games played, I have the scores I have the events, but then I need to sort them and put them out properly based on very different criteria. It's giving me headaches!

New hobby

As the fishing season has begun, I've now got the chance to start learning how to fish. A new hobby is a good thing, having been a professional programmer for years with my hobby being programming, it doesn't leave much time for fresh air.

I've started to find some really good resources, the best of which so far appears to be New Jersey Saltwater Fisherman. A site dedicated to fishing here in New Jersey, with friendly forums, a really nice layout and design and other resources. I'm trying to learn knots, trying to learn how to rig my rods up properly. It's going to be a tough learning curve, although it will get easier when I'm able to fish. The weather isn't very forgiving at the moment, rain most days!