FTC's Game Teaches Social Networking Skills 76
narramissic writes, "Your tax dollars at work. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched an online quiz-show style game called Buddy Builder to test young users' abilities to spot potential threats on social networking Web sites. Naturally, the teen audience this is intended to reach is not going to go near the game except as a joke."
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Anybody seen Tron? (Score:2)
Re:Anybody seen 1984? (Score:1)
watch this [google.com] Start at 1 hour 31 minutes. (or not)
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"I keep telling myself 'It is only a game' but it still isn't fun!"
A step in the right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
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Back on topic: I wonder if they might consider doing the same kind of thing for my parents' generation to help them spot phishing attacks and deal with pop-ups.
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People make jokes about serious and bad things, murder, injury, kidney-bathtub-ice abductions. But at the same time there's a serious undertone that you pick up on. How many jokes were made about, say, being
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Public: "Something must be done!"
Politician: "This is something; therefore, it must be done!"
Doing something, anything, even if it's bad, is a bad idea. I think Americans suffer from a hysteria of action -- if there is a problem, we must act, immediately, screw the consequences! Any problem we encounter in any facet of our life is a result of someone not doing their job or something not working right, and it must be fixed immediately.
Sometimes you ha
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Public: "Something is happening!"
Politician: "Everything must be done!"
Cue the Bear Patrol.
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Oh My God! (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that's good for is so the grade three students can have some "educational time on the internet" and play with the computers..
Really, I feel dumber having played that game -- seriously it says someone saying "hey baby - you look hot
I learned a lot (Score:2)
Who is this for? (Score:2)
It's more likely to be a how-to for perverts and pedophiles than anything else since children won't go near it.
Let me be the first to say (Score:1)
The game (Score:5, Funny)
Buddy Builder can be found here: http://onguardonline.gov/quiz/index.html [onguardonline.gov]
But whatever magic is needed to play, I don't have because it just pops up a blank window. Damn, now I'll never learn how to keep myself safe while having fun doing it!
Anyway, all I know from TFA is that this question: "Accept or Deny: Wazzup? I think I know U send me your pic (in swimsuit, pls!)?" was blatantly and may I add illegally ripped from my IM session. The worst part was that "partygrrl666", aka "Bert the middle aged FTC agent", did send me a pic of himself in a swimsuit. Okay, you got me twice now Bert!
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Ten seconds of play-time and it's pretty damn weak. It spends a good deal of time in miscellaneous flash-intro-junk before turning into a quiz.
The first question was, "I just moved to the area, and think you're really good looking. R U dating anyone?" For which it dinged me for accepting the IM. Hey, letting them know my dating status is not doing anybody any harm. Sure, I'd be dubious about giving any actual data about myself after that, but the question itself is not a prob
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The intro to this 'game' reminded me of being a kid and watching reruns of the Brady Bunch on nick-at-nite
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Linky linky. [nickscipio.com]
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Pity you didn't say black window....It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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wait (Score:1)
For the lazy (Score:2)
Lazy Link To The Quiz... (Score:1)
what a waste of taxpayer $$$ (Score:1)
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Then again a great portion of graduates cant add 1 and 1, much less spell the equation in English...
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If I had mod points I'd mod you up. That reminds me of almost every bloody subject -- but I did go to a public school in the country.
Not a waste of taxpayer $$$ (Score:2)
Spelling and grammar... (Score:2)
It's kinda funny - if you simply deny all the samples which use bad grammar and spelling, you'll get all but one right. And the one you get wrong is some guy you supposedly haven't seen for three years. All I can say is that if he can't bother putting in the effort to spell "you" and "are" out completely, he doesn't get on the friend list.
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I'm not sure that children/teenagers have the same keenly developed nose for bad grammar and spelling. In fact, they'd probably be *more* suspicious of an IM with prop
Pointless (Score:1)
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Naturally (Score:1)
Having aced it.. (Score:1)
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I'm A Buddy All Star! (Score:2)
Of course, it didn't say how I would get on that list. Maybe they have a signup page where I can enter my name, address, social security number and a picture of myself in the bathtub. Oh, here it is [myspace.com].
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Not that bad (Score:2)
I could actually see it being a well rounded faq on common internet technologies for any age group. Just because its from the FCC doesnt mean its bad automatically. It does look like they d
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So I clicked on "Buddy Builder" and... (Score:2)
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Yeah, that's right, I said "film strip". Maybe next time, they should use more current music like Ace Of Base or Hootie and the Blowfish.
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Maybe it'd be better for parents (Score:2)
Based on the occasional hysteria over MySpace, many adults either assume that merely being on MySpace makes you a target for predators or on the other hand that kids implicitly know how to
Better social networking software would help... (Score:2)
This is all sound advice, but ultimately, better social networking software would go a long way towards privacy on the internet. MySpace is probably the worst, with basically only two options (private or public profile), and very little granular control. Livejournal has gotten better with friends filters, but for a while there, once someone was on your friends list, they had access to basically everything. I've heard facebook, with their StalkerHelper 2.0 additions can be considered one of the worst. I
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You're All Missing Something Here... (Score:1)
Jerks (Score:2)
What they should be teaching them (Score:2)
Seriously, I really fear for these kids putting so much of their lives online. They're going to regret it in 3-5 years when they graduate and find out they can't get a decent job because everyone knows all
Direct Link (Score:1)
child/adult incompatible question (Score:1)
Biased questions (Score:1)
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That is quite naive.
An online stalker/pedophile or whatever slowly harvests as much information as possible, piece by piece, starting out with something apparently harmless (e.g. what are your pets' names? what's your favourite band?) until without realising it, their potential victim has revealed enough for them to be tracked down in real life. There's not really one single thing that it is wrong to reveal onli