The Internet Playground
For a lot of people the internet is an endless source of fun, for others it’s one humongous opportunity to be who you want to be. I’m going to talk a bit about the latter.
A lot of kids show up on the internet, big news. Some of them photoshop their avatars and upgrade their virtual identities to be something they think the general population will envy and respect. Sure, this may very well prove true for a lot of the online population. But every polished persona will at some point look like just that, polished. Upgrading your 15-year old IRL identity to an 18-year old datacenter owner without neither the english skills nor the internet infrastructure knowledge to back it up will eventually get you into trouble.
Of course, trouble on the internet isn’t the same as trouble IRL, thank god for that. But still, when you’re getting your threads about non-validating company websites with no grammar whatsoever flamed to a constant 1st place on the New Posts search you might want to consider dropping the charade.
Fine, you go ahead and keep it up if you want, but consistently claiming that you are 18 might prove difficult when your WHOIS tells us otherwise.
What troubles me the most is the amount of legal education that the kids of today seem to be getting. I get threatened for breaking PUL (Swedish Privacy Protection Law) by posting his real age when this guy is ripping copyrighted websites (his / theirs) and send the admin threatening messages (sorry about the lousy translation, even in his native language he makes no sense) about closing down the forum for not complying with PUL (which strictly prohibits handing out sensitive personal information, so that doesn’t even make any sense!).
I love the playground.
