I was going to Blog about how EW senior critic,Owen Gleiberman, totally blew the call with comparison his of Kurt Russell with that no-talent hack Alec Baldwin in his review of "Miracle". I was going to rave about how great and important an actor I think Kurt Russell is, but then I noticed that Dakota had attempted to sign me up for Gevalia.

This is one of those shocking parental moments when you realize that your mother was right. The internet is a dangerous place and a two-year old can not be left alone to surf unsupervised any more than she could be left unsupervised to in browse Barns of Nobles.

A bit more context:

In 1985, I was going to go on a bike ride from Elmsford to Briar Cliff Manor with one of my weirdo friends who was interested in local history. My mom had a funny feeling about the whole thing and finally said, "No. An 11 year old and a 16 year old should not hang out."

"But Mom," I pleaded, "I log on to his BBS every day and post messages to all my friends in the 914 BBS community"

My mom exclaimed, "That sort of thing is dangerous!"

With that our attitudes on the whole cyberspace thing more or less hardened. She never trusted anybody online ever again.

For my own part, as an I.T. Manager, I've caught people doing all sorts of stupid things. For external threats, I've had to deal with all sorts of malicious stuff from the script kiddies. Towards this end, I always felt like the bad people on the Internet were the bad people who you'd run into in real life - and for the same reasons. Armed with an understanding of the technology and of people, computing on the internet would be as safe or unsafe as anything else.

HUBRIS!

Even the innocuous MSN has click-through ads that can lead to pretensions coffee and worse! Somehow like glaucoma or kudzu, I've not noticed how every freakin' thing on the Internet is infested with advertisements. The real creeps are not the kidnappers but the marketeers. This was a threat that hid in plain sight.

How do I protect my baby from salesmen? For now I have no answers, only Google Toolbar.