Spring is here, with thoughts of world issues at SCS

LAKEVILLE — Cyberbullying is a serious problem, according to Norah O’Dea, an eighth-grade student at Salisbury Central School.Her presentation was part of the Eighth-Grade Expo on Friday, June 13.First, the terminology needs to be clarified. Norah said that online harassment between two minors is cyber bullying; between an adult and a minor is cyber stalking; and between two adults is cyberharassment. Cyber bullying is underreported to law enforcement (in those states that have laws on the subject), she said. And of the cases that are reported, 37 percent go nowhere for lack of evidence.In just 10 percent of cases involving children does the victim tell a parent or adult.And parents tend to overreact. Asked if a victim might be reluctant to tell or involve parents because of fear of losing online privileges, or fear of stirring things up and making it worse, Norah said she thought it was the latter.“Nobody wants to be called a snitch,” she said.She said there have been 43 suicides of children since 2006 connected to cyberbullying, which is why she chose the topic.“This is something that kills children. I wanted to get the word out.”Gabby Sartori’s project was on cyber terrorism and online crime.“It’s the new language of war,” she said. “Imagine if terrorists could shut down the power grid, the Internet, everything.”She said the four most common methods of online attacks are hacking, Trojan horses, a virus or worm and email crime.Gabby said the school had issued an alert just the day before, warning students and faculty not to open emails from a certain address because of a virus.She advised creating difficult passwords, with numbers and upper- and lower-case letters, but to keep them fairly short so they can be remembered.And don’t use “123456,’ “password” or “iloveyou.” The bad guys know about these common passwords.Ryan Considine’s project was on deforestation. He said the forests of Australia, Mexico, central Africa and most of South America are in trouble from heavy logging.“The countries with the most trees are the U.S., China and France,” he said.