How did a programmer find sex offenders on MySpace?
When MySpace claimed there was simply no way for it to patrol its own profiles for sexual predators, Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen took it as a challenge. It took him about five months to write and execute a program that could locate registered sex offenders on MySpace who were dumb enough — or hey, maybe just that darned honest — to sign up using their real names. MySpace has been waiting for new laws to be passed that would require known sex offenders to register their e-mail address in addition to the other required information. This approach seems somewhat pointless considering how many e-mail addresses most people have. I have four. I know people who have 10 or more. But who can blame MySpace for assuming that no one on the registered sex offenders list would sign up on MySpace using their real names? Still, Poulsen took a shot, and the results were astonishing. He wrote 1,000 lines of Ja
