I hope online predators are too busy hiding from the cops to read the latest Pew study.

The premise remains - kids are smarter than their parents think. But maybe what we need is a little misinformation now and then to quell the concern.

I’d like to see a study released that says “85% of all social networking profiles are created by beer drinking, football-crazed men aged 35-45 who have concealed weapons permits and moonlight as undercover agents.” What would the scumbags think then?

Despite the fact that Pew says internet users are approaching the web with a bit more caution, I’ll reiterate that I view most surveys with some skepticism.

Case in point - spyware reporting activity is soaring. The flip side of this coin could be that monitoring of spyware “calling home” activity is a nascent observation, or that spyware is getting worse at hiding its process. But I doubt it.

It takes a long time to change human behaviour - my guess is folks may be “thinking” more cautiously, but still “doing” the same old same old.

How did we get here?

I don’t love the internet, as it is neither my dog, my girlfriend, nor a human member of my family. I hope nobody else falls in love with it either, or they should find somebody to talk to about their social introversion. But the internet is extremely useful, and it has changed the way we do business, gather news, and organize our daily lives.

It can certainly be a “like”/hate relationship though, and I am wondering how it became so.

I don’t type away on this blog for my health or my wealth - I do it because I actually hope people will get a clue. And while Pew says internet users are figuring out the dangers of net use, I take everything they say with a grain of salt nowadays.

Phishing attacks are growing by leaps and bound. The numbers are staggering - attempts are up more than 200% over the last few months. Furthermore, a third of those emails contain some sort of virus, or link to a site stuffing trojans on the computer.

Sophos recently reported record malware circulation, with roughly 8,000 distinct programs detected - an increase of 60% so far this year.

Of course, I could do like everyone else and point the finger at one of the main culprits - holes in the Windows operating system - but I will refrain (ha ha). Yea, I won’t beat a dead horse too much, but it does piss me off that I had to buy an Apple to avoid much of this crap, while finding it difficult to sell my lovely Windows slab for a third of what I had in it.

No, I am not bitter. But I suspect some people are. Who or what is to blame? Commercialization, Microsoft, internet protocol v4, criminals’ inability to find honest work, computer users’ lack of desire to learn (how to operate with caution), or something else?

I don’t have the answer, but I hope someone could CLUE ME IN.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study on email and spam and came up with some interesting, if not strange conclusions. Fewer Americans mistrusted email as a result of spam, and fewer said they spent less time on email as a result of spam. The Pew study concluded Americans are becoming more tolerant of spam.

Spamroll has a few thoughts on this matter.

The statistics gathered could easily be the result of the flood of consumer awareness news that has hit the streets. If people are more informed about the issues, and feel they can draw their own conclusions about a suspect message, then why wouldn’t their mistrust decline? Knowledge is power, and the message IS getting out. Second, the fact that Americans are less inclined to not use email says just about the same thing. They know to hit the delete button.

This isn’t more tolerant, its more education.

Read the report from the Globe & Mail, and tell me what you think.

By the way, the last thing we need is spammers thinking that people “are more accepting” of junk email. Regardless of the results of the survey, I would have entitled the report “Americans are Fed Up With Spam - the Forming of Citizen Militias to Tar and Feather Spammers is Imminent”. But then again, who cares what Pew thinks anyway.