The news that people are sharing images of child sexual abuse on the Internet through programs that are normally used to swap music should not surprise us.

Throughout the net’s twenty-year history people have always found ways to use it for unpleasant, illegal and evil activities.

Some share obscene images, others plan criminal or terrorist acts. And some try to defraud innocent people by offering get-rich-quick offers that are too good to be true.

Images of child abuse – what is often called child pornography – have been sent by email.

These images are also posted on websites and shared through discussion groups (bulletin boards) and chat programs for many years.

Now these files are being copied over ‘peer to peer’ services like KaZaA, Morpheus and Gnutella, used by millions of people to copy music.

It is not the fault of the people running the services, since they have no way of knowing what is being copied.

That’s because a computer file is just a collection of 1s and 0s and could be anything from a program to a song to a photograph.

And it is something which the police can do something about, by finding and tracking the files and finding out whose computers they are stored on.

I don’t think we should let stories about this sort of thing be used to close down the services themselves, but this misuse of the Internet does worry me greatly.

Worried about your kids?

As a parent I am concerned that my children should be protected from some of the harder facts of life until they are mature enough to cope with the sad facts of life.

They know that they should be careful online and never give out personal information or tell strangers secrets about themselves.

They know that they should only search through child-friendly sites like Yahooligans! or BBCi Search.

And they know that they can come and tell me about anything they find that is worrying or disturbing.

(BBCi Chatguide have great advice for kids and adults on online safety.)

But my daughter is reaching the age where she will want to look for the latest music online. She already spends time at the Avril Lavigne site, and is a big fan of Pink and Ms Dynamite.

So I need to think how I can protect her from finding the wrong sort of files when she goes searching for new music to listen to.

We already have a family filter on the computer she uses, but it cannot protect her from copying a file that she thinks is a picture of a rock band and finding it is something else instead.

I am going to have to talk to her and warn her of the danger; because I know that here I cannot rely on a computer program to keep her safe.

But I will not ban her from using the file sharing services; because then I would be limiting her use of what I still believe is an important and valuable resource.

The Internet may not be completely safe, but our kids can learn how to deal with what the find there – if we help them out.

Worried about your kids?
Click here to have your say!

I am fed up with the amount of junk email – spam – that I get every day.

This morning I had eighty-nine messages waiting for me when I turned on my computer, and eighty-one of them were spam.

It is just ridiculous, and it’s making my email almost unusable. So I’ve decided to take action.

Telling the spammers you don’t want their messages won’t work, because most of them are operating illegally anyway, selling dodgy potions or fake schemes for getting rich.

Instead I’ve installed a program called Mailwasher. It checks my email before I download it and marks the messages it thinks are spam.

Then I go through them and check it’s got it right before deleting them without even reading them.

It can even send a message back to the spammer saying ‘this address was not found’.

In the hope that these dodgy customers will then delete my address from their mailing lists and I’ll get fewer unwanted emails in future.

I’ve only been using it for two days so I don’t know if it works yet – but watch this space!

Want to get rid of Spam?
Click here to have your say!