The case of Megan Meier screams out for justice. But to be truly served, justice must be based on a rationality, not just revenge and emotion. It was disclosed in November that the 14-year-old Missouri girl committed suicide after an adult neighbor - the mother of one of Megan’s friends - allegedly carried out a cruel hoax. That mother, Lori Drew, reportedly set up a fake MySpace profile that appeared to belong to a hot-looking teenage boy named Josh Evans. The fake “Josh” initially befriended Megan but later told her he didn’t want to be friends with her. Megan, who had a history of taking anti-depression medication, responded by hanging herself.

She isn’t the first child to take her own life as a result of cyberbullying, but this case is bizarre in that the main perpetrator was an adult mom rather than a fellow teenager. Drew’s purpose in helping to create the fake site was reportedly to determine whether Megan had said mean things about Drew’s own daughter.

No charges were filed against Drew. In announcing his decision not to prosecute, Charles County, Mo., prosecutor Jack Banas said, “There’s no way that anyone could know that talking to someone or saying that you’re mean to your friends on the Internet would create a substantial risk.”

That decision prompted outrage from Megan’s parents and many others.

Officials from Megan’s town of Dardenne Prairie wasted no time unanimously passing a statute that makes Internet harassment a local misdemeanor. Others have called for state and federal legislation to make it a crime to post comments anonymously or under an assumed identity. While I understand the intentions behind the proposed legislation, I worry about such laws in the hands of overzealous prosecutors. What concerns me is the knee jerk reaction to a tragic but extremely infrequent occurrence.

The Megan Meier case, according to Nancy Willard, author of the book “Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats” is exceptionally rare. “The vast majority of situations involve teens harassing or bullying other teens.”

The case reminds me how many in the media, along with lawmakers and regulators, reacted to the handful of Internet predator cases reported over the past couple of years. A couple of tragic cases prompted attorneys general from several states to threaten lawsuits against MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. There have been media reports about an “epidemic” of predator attacks, yet very few substantiated cases.

Congress held numerous hearings, including one heavily publicized Senate Judiciary committee meeting last fall where teenage victim Alicia Kozakiewicz testified that “the boogey man is real. And he lives on the Net - he lived in my computer and he lives in yours. While you are sitting here, he is at home with your children.”

I don’t blame Alicia for saying those words. She suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of a brutal rapist. But what happened to her was extremely unusual. In the vast majority of cases, sexual perpetrators and their teenage victims know each other from the offline world. And in the few Internet related exploitation cases we do know about, the teen engaged in some form of risky behavior.

Cyberbullying is not so rare but as we combat the problem, we need to approach it with some common sense. Studies from both the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the University of New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center have shown that about one-third of teens have been victims of cyberbullying and an equal number have bullied or harassed others. (more…)

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it seems to me that there are three basic types of digital cameras: little ones, big ones and ones in the middle.

By little I of course mean all of those pocket-sized “point and shoot” cameras that are so popular with consumers. Most of these cameras give you great-looking shots at close range. Typically they have a 3x optical zoom and these days they have more than enough “megapixels” to produce excellent photos up to 8 1/2 by 11, even if you do a bit of cropping. Small cameras have small sensors which means that they’re not going to be terrific in low-light conditions and they often have very few manual controls which is OK by most people who are happy to rely on the automatic settings.

Then there are the big cameras. These are the Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras sometimes called “D-SLR” or just “SLR.” If you’ve ever seen a professional photographer at work, chances are he or she was holding a D-SLR camera along with a bag containing two or more lenses. Today’s digital SLRs have evolved from the old film SLRs with their removable “interchangeable lenses” that let photographers switch from a wide angle to a telephoto or more specialized lens as the situation dictates. Their name comes from the fact that the optical view finders used to preview the picture get the image from the camera’s lens via a mirror so that a photographer sees exactly what the film or digital sensor picks up.

There are other advantages to D-SLRs. They tend to have larger digital sensors which makes them better suited for low-light conditions and they tend to be a lot faster than smaller cameras. If you’ve ever tried to record the action of a soccer game or even an active toddler with a point and shoot camera, you may have experienced the pain of lag time between shots, especially if you were using the flash. They also have a nice feel to them. There is something reassuring about the physical “click” you get when you press the shutter as opposed to that simulated clicking sound coming from the little speakers inside smaller cameras. (more…)

I spent part of last week trapped in the “Steve Jobs Reality-Distortion Field.”

Well-known among Apple watchers, the phrase was first uttered 26 years ago, according to Andy Hertzfield. On Folklore.org, he credits Bud Tribble, Hertzfield’s manager at Apple at the time, with creating the phrase in 1981 to describe how Jobs can “convince anyone of practically anything.”

The term now has its own acronym, RDF, and a listing on Wikipedia which defines RDF as “the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward.”

I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps it should also be listed as a disease or at least a syndrome. Every time I’m about to cover a Jobs’ keynote speech, I try to immunize myself against RDF but it’s just too infectious. Even after 25 years of covering tech, I still find myself becoming overly enthusiastic, at least for a while. Fortunately, like the common cold, RDF tends to go away after about a week, though there are many people who seem to have a chronic case of it.

There are three stages of RDF. The first hits you a couple of weeks before Jobs’ speech, when you begin to hear the rumors. It gets progressively virulent in the days leading up to Macworld. In my case, it’s reinforced by my role at CBS News, where I’m asked to do “two-ways” with stations around the country. (more…)

Until the mid-’90s, if you wanted to print something in color, you had to use an ink jet printer. Laser was for black and white only. Then in 1994, CMS came out with a color laser printer but it was priced at $10,000.

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Listen to Larry Magid’s interview with Brother spokesman Jeffrey Sandler

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What a difference a bit more than a decade makes. Today you can get personal color laser printers for less than $400. And based on my recent experience with a couple of inexpensive Brother printers, the quality can be remarkably good.I started out by borrowing a $399 Brother HL-4040CN but liked it so much that I would up buying an upgraded version, the HL-4070CDW which Brother says costs $499, but I found it online for $388, including shipping.As far as speed, print quality and supplies are concerned, both printers are identical but the higher-end version comes with wireless Ethernet (as well as wired and USB) and can automatically print in duplex mode - on both sides of the page. Duplex mode saves both paper and money. Printing is a little bit slower than if you print on one side, but not much.

When you use duplex with an ink jet printer there is a considerable delay for the ink to dry before it goes back to print the other side. Laser is a dry process so there is no need for drying time.

Both the black text and colors were crisp and vivid, especially when I used the printer driver’s advanced settings to take advantage of its highest quality mode. (more…)

It’s far too early to declare the computer hard drive obsolete. But thanks to the tech industry’s ability to trim the size of flash memory chips, it is now possible to make full-feature laptops that store their data and programs on “solid-state drives,” or SSDs.

Traditional hard drives record data on magnetically encoded platters that spin around thousands of revolutions per minute. Data is retrieved via a head that floats over the platters.

A solid-state drive uses non-volatile flash memory with no moving parts, which makes it shock resistant. There is no risk of data being destroyed by a head crashing onto a platter. SSDs are also faster and more energy efficient.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Lenovo announced its new IdeaPad notebook series that includes a very small and lightweight model with a 64-gigabyte SSD. The IdeaPad U110, which will be available in March, weighs as little as 2.3 pounds and features an 11-inch-wide screen display.

These are Lenovo’s first laptops aimed at the consumer market. Its ThinkPad laptops are very popular among business people, including road warriors who appreciate its rugged and lightweight X series. I’m writing this column on a 3.5-pound ThinkPad X60.

Lenovo is offering two other IdeaPads - a 15.4-inch model, which weighs 6.4 pounds and starts at $749, and a 17-inch version that weighs 7.9 pounds and costs $1,090. Both models come only with standard hard drives as well as a CD/DVD writer and reader.

All three Lenovo laptops feature a 1.3 megapixel camera with unique face recognition software that can control who gets to use the computer. When you first get an IdeaPad you “enroll” authorized users by having them pose in front of the camera. From then on, you just look at the camera to gain access.

I wasn’t able to test this feature, but a Lenovo spokesman said that it’s highly accurate and can’t be fooled by holding up a photo of the person. Even without the face recognition software, building a camera into a notebook PC is a great idea. Companies like Logitech do a brisk business with after-market Web cameras, but there is something about having one built-in to encourage its use. Besides, as Apple’s ads have humorously pointed out (all Mac notebooks and iMacs have built-in cameras), attaching a camera to a notebook PC is a bit kludgey.

The yet-to-be-released little U110 is clearly the most interesting of the three IdeaPads because of its size, stylish design and optional use of an SSD memory. (more…)

The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show is in the history books and, sadly, I was one of the last to leave the hall after they dimmed the lights as a hint that it was time to leave. I didn’t intend to stay till the last minute - it’s just that my flight from Las Vegas doesn’t leave until late Thursday night. I’m writing this from a Las Vegas coffee shop as I anxiously anticipate my flight home.

I’m sure I speak for the majority of the press corps as well as many of the exhibitors and attendees by saying that CES is exhausting. I’m not complaining. It’s great to get to see cutting edge technology but sharing that experience with 140,000 other people in crowded exhibit halls is no picnic, especially when you have to get across town from the main halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center to hotel suites or auxiliary halls aboard taxis or crowded buses inching along grid-locked streets.

Enough griping. The real reason I spent that past five days in Las Vegas was so I could figure out the trends for 2008. Of course with thousands of products on display, trying to summarize CES would be like trying to describe all of Europe in a few hundred words. It’s far too diverse for that.

A few trends I did notice however were: wireless video, increased use of touch interface, tech going green and the emergence of affordable high-end digital cameras.

A number of vendors were showing off wireless technologies to get high-definition video from the source device, such as a digital video recorder or DVD player to a TV. I was impressed by Belkin’s FlyWire device that sends HDMI signals (high definition audio and video) up to 100 feet through walls. The unit they were showing can be used to connect one source device with one TV, but a spokesperson said they were working on ways to support multiple TVs around the house. It should be available by summer for a price of about $600, though that is subject to change. Pulse-Link showed similar devices that can connect one or multiple TVs to a variety of audio and video sources. Other companies innovating in this area include Hewlett Packard, LG and Westinghouse Digital which are putting its wireless adapters in TVs. (more…)

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One of the trends I’m observing at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show is the industry’s transformation from geek to chic. It appears that lots of companies are taking a page from Apple’s playbook by creating products that look as good (or maybe even better) than they work.

At their pre-CES press conferences, executives from both Philips and Samsung emphasized style as they unveiled their 2008 high-definition TVs and other offerings. Philips launched its “Design Collection” that the compamy’s Consumer Lifestyle Chief Executive Officer, Andrea Ragnetti called “products with a simpler and softer, more sophisticated design. Something that touches the heart as well as the head.”

Included among the products is a new 52-inch Ultimate Dream TV that features a translucent bevel. One reason for the emphasis on appearance, said Mr. Ragnetti, is the increasing role that women play as technology decision makers in the home. The era of the man of the house buying gear based purely on specifications is giving way to a more esthetic sense of how the technology fits into the home décor. The way I see it, women are a lot more practical than men. They’re concerned about form as well as function.

New TVs from Samsung and other vendors reflect this trend as do new MP3 players from Sandisk including the remarkably well priced Sansa Clip which ranges from $39.99 for a 1 GB model to only $79.99 for a 4 GB player. Colors include black, blue, pink, red and silver.

Even some typically pedestrian hardware devices like Internet routers are sporting a new look. D-Link’s new Xtreme N Gaming Router features the latest and fastest wireless Internet connections around in a box that’s actually pleasant to look at.

No matter how good a piece of tech gear might look when it’s in the showroom, it’s not going to look very good if surrounded by a rat’s nest of wires. That’s certainly a problem in my house where my high-definition TV and audio system require multiple cables to handle a variety of input and output sources including DVD player, an Apple TV, an Xbox game console, a personal video recorder and a satellite receiver. My wife tries to hide the wires by putting up some pretty barriers on the floor between the main part of the room and where the entertainment system is but it’s not working. Almost as soon as she finds a way to hide the cords, I come up with a new device and a couple of new cables.

But solutions are in sight. Pulse-Link and Westinghouse Digital introduced the first fully integrated wireless HDTV at CES. The TV has no wires except the power cord. With Pulse-Link’s Wave UWB (ultra wideband), the TV is able to take in signals over the air from compatible personal video recorders, DVD players and other sources. Pulse-Link also makes adapters to retrofit other TVs and source devices that don’t have the built-in technology.

There are plenty of other wireless solutions for cutting cords and clutter including wireless USB which can be used to connect PCs to printers, storage systems, cameras and other peripherals. The goal is to make it possible to transfer data between devices simply by having them in proximity to each other.

Speakers are another sore point when it comes to home décor. Not only are speaker wires untidy, but sometimes it’s nearly impossible to get them across a room without creating a safety hazard. Parrot, which is a leading provider of Bluetooth hands free cell phone speakers and headsets and other wireless Bluetooth products is now offering a line of wireless speakers that can receive signals from compatible digital music players including many of the Bluetooth enabled cell phones with digital music capabilities.

Iogear has another twist on wireless speakers, using wires to cut down on wires. Its new Powerline Stereo System ($329.95) takes advantage of the electrical wires already in your walls to get music or TV audio from the source to speakers that can be placed anywhere in the home. The kit includes a docking station that connects to the audio source and individual adapters for each set of speakers. Both the docking and the speaker adapters plug into electrical outlets.

With getting prettier and wires are on the verge of extinction, there is a new found emphasis on good looks here in Las Vegas. But don’t worry - there are still plenty of geeky looking guys and gals walking up and down the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. This conference may be showing off fresh and innovative technology but even after only one day of the show, many of us walking the miles of aisles at CES and getting stuck in grid-lock traffic between venues are starting to look tired and bit worse for wear. Modern Internet routers are helping move data and breakneck speeds but getting around Vegas is slower than ever.