Attention parents: Microsoft would like to share a few words with you about the odd combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation marks that you may encounter when reading your children’s email and IM logs. It would seem that there is this thing called “the leet-speak” (don’t worry if that term makes no sense, it’s all explained in the article!!) that allows kids to carry on entire conversations about sex, drugs and software piracy right underneath your virtual nose. This phenomenon has been evolving (or, was created by God, if you prefer) for some time now and has shown no signs of retreat. MSNBC correspondant Bob Sullivan (or g0@t33s3cx33, as he is known online) cites the following statistic in a recent report:
While 61 percent of parents said they issued rules about Net use, only 37 percent of teen-agers said they were subjected to Net time restrictions.
Are you as not shocked as I am?! Well luckily there’s something that can be done about it. Parents who wish to continue focusing on the symptoms of the problem, instead of the root cause, are advised to commit this list of acronyms to memory and to avoid direct discussion of the following topics: Sex, Drugs, and Software Piracy. When reached for comment on the issue, the Digital Security industry urged parents to continue the use of easily defeated monitoring and content-filtering programs, so as to encourage a “healthy disrespect” for such technologies in teens and young adults.