It's kids vs adults, and the prize is MySpace, the social-networking site that is (a) often mistakenly called a "blog" by major news organizations (b) often considered the only place where sexual predators go after kids (c) a place where even the teenage users -- a preponderance of them, anyway -- are smart enough to not get taken in by predators. But of course, those in authority have to be seen as doing something, so they're going to continue trying to regulate MySpace and access to it.

In Illinois, Community High School District 128 will now be holding students accountable for what they do on MySpace:

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said.

District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.

Great. So now instead of planting drugs on other students, the geeks will simply tell the administrators that a popular kid or jock has something "worrisome" on their site.

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

The social networking Web site MySpace.com allows its nearly 80 million users to post pictures and personal information while communicating with others.

District 128, in Lake County north of Chicago, has some 3,200 students, about 80 percent of whom participate in extracurricular activities, according to school officials.

And, once again, MySpace is mistakenly considered a "blog" site. Sure, they have blog capability, MySpace is not a blog. I don't care how often you hear it on CNN. Oh, and Yahoo News doesn't seem to know either; they titled the article "School District to Monitor Student Blogs". (H/T: The Consumerist)

As expected, when the adults say no, the kids fight back, which apparently the adults have forgotten that they themselves did back in the day (H/T: Boingboing:

Last November, "Ryan", a high-school sophomore, figured out a way to outsmart the Web filters on a school PC in order to visit the off-limits MySpace.com while doing "homework" in the computer lab.

[...]

Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that allow users to access other sites through them.)

[...]

"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.

Web proxies are almost as old as the Internet itself as a means to route Web traffic through an anonymous domain name or circumvent content-filters, and they've long been the territory of corporate networks and the tech savvy seeking privacy. Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering technology providers.

If the school technology "experts" are just figuring out about proxies now, imagine what new ways kids already have in store for getting to MySpace on school grounds.

"It's going to be the constant battle. No matter what you put up, kids are going to work around it," said Lynn Beebe, a school counselor in Scotts Valley, Calif. Her school, for example, uses filters to block all sites with the word or subject "blog," in addition to other sites.

Blogs are not inherently bad. Without blogs, who would have known about Ra^thergate? Who would have known about the Swift Boat Veterans? Who would have known about Karl Rove's indictment? (Oh, wait, the news obsessively covered that last one because it cast the president in a negative light. But I digress.) You can learn a lot from a blog.

This is just a continuation of the same battle that was fought in the fifties over smoking and alcohol, in the sixties over drugs, and in the seventies and eighties over nudie magazines. The adults should just be glad the kids are only going to MySpace and not searching for porn or anything actually harmful.

The winners in this one will be the kids, and the adults who realize the kids are just being kids so they make proxy and CGI-scripting sites available to these kids. It's just sad that the biggest battle in education is being fought not over class sizes or standardized testing but a stupid social networking site that, in the end, is much less harmful than the exclusionary tactics of "popular" kids at high schools.

Guest Blogger Josh Cohen makes his home at Multiple Mentality.

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