It makes an eye-catching headline, doesn’t it?

You may have read or heard something similar in the last few days. This C|Net article provides plenty of detail, as does this Computerworld article. The upshot is that there’s a 1998 law, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA, not to be confused with COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), that was recently declared unconstitutional for being too vague.

It’s the sort of decision that talk radio would sink its teeth into in a big way, if it cared much about online issues. As C|Net explains, the law “makes it a crime for commercial Web sites to make ‘harmful to minors’ material publicly available, with violators fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to six months.” The law has never been enforced.

Whether the law is upheld or not, the ability for kids to access porn online is only slightly more difficult than the ability for a kid to access the Internet in the first place.

Which is exactly why a triple-x domain ought to be created. Let the pornmeisters set up shop there, let the filters be created to easily block .xxx sites and let the law deal harshly with any pornographer who sets up shop elsewhere.

5 Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb is a good article from Copyblogger, and just about every comment that follows the article is worth reading, too.

What’s worse is that these sorts of blatant errors aren’t limited to sloppy blogging: They’re commonplace in the majority of business communication that crosses my email inbox.

To Copyblogger’s list I’m compelled to add: blatant misuse of the apostrophe. Like those signs in front of houses: “The Reade’s.” The Reade’s what? The Reade’s sign? The Reade’s house? The Reade’s garden? I always imagine that a word was left off by the sign painter.

Oh, a bunch of people named Reade live here! So you meant plural and not possessive? Ahhh, now I get it!

Sheesh.

Just in case you missed the news, there’s a Trojan horse out there riding in via Skype IM. All the details are over here.

Bottom line: Be wary of links sent to you via Skype IM, even if it’s from someone you know.

“A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.”
—Aldous Huxley

SFGate published this interesting article about Twitter, which is sort of a microblogging application that’s getting a lot of attention and traction among the geekerati.

Twitter posts are supposed to answer the Twitter-posed question, “What are you doing?” The noise-to-signal ratio in the collective responses is significant. Viewing the public timeline of posts is reminiscent of going into a chat room: Lots of words, but not a whole lot being said.

Because each Twitter post is limited to 140 characters, it feels like there should some sort of mobile phone messaging use for it. It also feels like Twitter is an answer in search of a problem. Or a business plan.