girl friend. There's a new watchdog on the block tracking Net filters - and which non-porn sites they're trapping wrongly. And one topless model of renown is about to gain a stepfather - five years her junior. It's the Newsex Roundup, for your pleasure...
VALPARAISO, IN - A sex counselor hoping to meet his e-girl friend, who'd asked him to go to a local convenience store in only a football jersey, got caught with his pants down, all right - he ended up meeting a police officer, who followed his car around the block after he'd been spotted and arrested him for public indecency. Psychologist Matias Reinaldo, Jr. is a counselor whose practice involves sex offenders among other patients. He told police his online girl friend, known to him only as Michelle, told him she'd go home with him on condition he was naked when he picked her up at the local 7-Eleven. She never showed up but an officer was there. Reinaldo is claiming a setup. The police say that's as may be but you still can't go to 7-Eleven without your clothes, or with only a football jersey. He's free on $2,000 bond and taking a leave of absence from the Porter-Starke Counseling Services, where he's worked for five years.
CYBERSPACE - It's one thing to catch a few "innocent" sites in the filtering software you think will keep your computer-smart kids from the Net porn. But it's something else again when more than half the sites are being blocked for no apparently good reason - as Peacefire, an anti-"censorware" group, says it proved when decrypting a list of thousands of sites blocked by I-Gear, made by Symantec of Norton Systemworks fame. "It shows how far people are willing to go in censoring people under 18 without applying critical examination of the tools," Peacefire founder Bennett Haselton tells Wired. Since then, Peacefire has frequently. "If [Symantec] hadn't taken time to pay an intern $10 for an hour's time to do what I did, it means they didn't care enough to take the time to improve their product." And he's developed a software utility to decrypt filtering programs' lists, from which point he examines the first fifty addresses blocked - say, in the .edu domain, which he says the majority blocked by I-Gear had nothing to do with porn, the category under which the sites were blocked. But Symantec has asked Peacefire's Internet service provider to remove their site's link to the Symantec information, saying Peacefire's posting the decrypting software and site information violates licensing agreements.
LONDON - Topless model/pop star Samantha Fox is about to become the stepdaughter of a man five years her junior. Her 53-year-old mother is marrying a 28-year-old man, according to the Sun - and Fox, who first grabbed attention in the 1980s, is thrilled. "I would have hated to have had some doddery old bloke suddenly come into my life, asking me to call him dad,'' she tells the Sun. "He could be my toyboy, let alone my mum's.'' Carole Fox and actor Paul Pariser plan a show-business style wedding in Las Vegas - where they say they'll be married by an Elvis lookalike. As for mummy dearest, younger men are quite her style - she tells the Sun she once went with a man her own age and he "turned up wearing an open-necked shirt with all these grey hairs sprouting out. I thought, 'yuck'.''
--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth
