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Michigander Ryan Pitylak was 14 when he started his career as an "online marketer" in 1997. Now he's a 22-year-old student at University of Texas, living in his own $450,000 house in "one of Austin's nicest neighborhoods" and driving a "late-model Jaguar," the Chicago Tribune reports. One of his companies spams people with "5 Free Health Insurance Quotes" or "Incredible 3.51% Mortgage Rates" or … [Read more...] about Spammer started at 14

Hmmm. The campers are "all guys ages 15 to 20," USAToday reports. Though this all sounds a bit sexist, the good news is, they're using New York University's Center for Advanced Digital Application's "cutting-edge facilities to learn the techniques behind best-selling digital masterpieces such as Doom, Quake, and Madden NFL Football." Typical day at camp? "Campers will arrive each day for a 9 a.m. … [Read more...] about Video game camp

About 13% of the students at San Jose's Evergreen High School have blogs on Xanga.com, and that's just one online journal site. One student told the San Jose Mercury News that he visits Xanga "like 50 times a day," either to post to his own blog or visit someone else's. Most of the blogs are innocuous, some cruel. "Evergreen's Xanga crowd operated largely under the radar of school officials until … [Read more...] about Xanga and other teen ‘hangouts’

You may've heard of the new Digital Age kind of zombie. I hope so, because it could be your family PC. Actually, the odds aren't great that your computer has been turned into a dummy machine run by malicious hackers, but the probability is growing - especially in households with very connected kids (gamers, IM-ers, file-sharers, Web researchers, emailers, contest-enterers, etc.). So if your … [Read more...] about What if our PC’s a zombie?!

For this law to work, a lot will depend on execution. "Michigan will soon become the second state [after Utah] to make it illegal to certain types of spam to kids," the Detroit News reports. Parents will be able to add their children's email addresses to a state-run do-not-email registry modeled after the federal do-not-call list run by the Federal Trade Commission. Anyone who emails those … [Read more...] about Michigan: Kids’ do-not-email list