Cyberbullying seems to be taking off, in a bad way. I say ‘seems’ because our news is full of it. However, our news is ‘full of it’ in another sense – it is created to fill the air time as cheaply as possible. So ‘social studies’ is often what ‘news’ really is, especially on television.

Assuming that cyberbullying is a real problem, then it behooves each one of us to stop any instances of which we are aware. So I’m posting this dumb idea in the hopes that someone with a better idea will implement something.

Suppose there was a well-know, Facebook and Twitter visible, website for reporting cyberbullying. Supposing the bullied could report there and get an eMail token or something and send electronic evidence of the bullying – cut&paste or whatever.

Supposing the recipient of this evidence, who presumably supports the assumed website, were to confirm its validity in some way, and approach the ISP of the source of the bullying, asking for a warning or cease-and-desist to be sent to the perpetrator.

Supposing this works, the website could claim to have helped one more person, anonymously of course.

Supposing the ISP were to disdain taking action. (Apparently, this is a likely outcome – go to www.grc.com and read Gibson’s report on ISP action after he was victim of a DDS attack.)

Suppose the ISP were then, er, encouraged to pay attention. I’m thinking a five-minute distributed denial of service (DDS) attack might get their notice. No doubt there’s a nicer way to do this, and I’m open to suggestions here also.

I wonder if a group like Anonymous, or some similar organization, would consider doing something vaguely like this to be in the public interest.

(As an aside, I have read that it is possible to buy ‘bot time’ by the thousand compromised computers, by the hour, in certain criminal circles. I find this fascinating and scary. I wonder how come the ISPs of these compromised personal computers aren’t aware of this waste of their bandwidth. )

any ‘Anonymous’ comments on this would be appreciated. AND, you must provide a real eMail address – which will never be visible on this website. But I will test it – with one short eMail to confirm validity.