Monday, April 2, 2001		Latest in IT world

Paedophile ring smashed

NINE persons have been arrested in an international child pornography ring that operated from a Russian Web site, the US Customs Service said. Two Russian suspects allegedly operated a Web site called the "Blue Orchid," which sold child porn videos over the Internet mostly to the USA, the Customs Service said. The Moscow city police department detained one suspect in the child porn ring last December, which led the combined Moscow and US Customs group to arrest four more persons in Russia and four others in the USA. The films, which sold for $ 200-$ 300 per video, featured sexual abuse of young Russian boys, mostly from homeless or troubled families.

Denmark, one of the world’s smallest countries, has the highest percentage of households connected to the Internet, followed by the USA, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea, according to findings from a January NetValue study released last week. The Internet measurement company said 54 per cent of households in Denmark are connected to the Internet compared to 50.9 per cent in the USA. NetValue also found that men worldwide use the Internet more than women, especially in Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom. The favourite male sites across the 12 countries involved cars, sports and pornography. Females flock to sites for women, fashion, beauty and electronic greeting cards, the report said. Almost all world’s top sites are portals.

The FBI agents raided a troubled American schoolboy’s home in Pennsylvania after he confided to a 16-year-old New Zealand Internet counsellor that he wanted to kill his classmates, New Zealand police said. Constable Johnny Rei said he passed information from the Internet counsellor in a suburb of Auckland to the FBI through Interpol. The teenage counsellor was working with the teen assistance group, Teenhelp, when the youth, who used the pseudonym Shyguy, confided that he, perceived all people as evil. "He said he wanted to kill everyone in his school and then he wanted to mutilate and torture them all," the counsellor told the Dominion newspaper. The counsellor’s mother called New Zealand police who went round to their house and persuaded Shyguy over the Internet to reveal his name and the name of his high school enabling them to track down his address.

— Reuters