Breaking news: The Internet is full of nefarious actors and explicit content!
Okay, that’s hardly shocking. But a pair of new academic studies attempt to quantify just how much bad stuff takes place on the Web:
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have weighed in on pornography: According to their report, almost half of U.S. children between 10 and 17 years old have seen sexually explicit content online at some point over the past year. For what it’s worth, 80 percent of those children say they stumbled upon Web porn accidentally, according to Bloomberg News.Meanwhile, scholars from the University of Maryland at College Park have investigated the extent to which hackers prowl the Internet. According to the Maryland study, a typical computer connected to the Net will be attacked by a hacker every 39 seconds — or 2,244 times in a day.
—Brock Read
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