The image of some closeted anti-social adult sex pervert preying on your children though the Internet was shattered by a recent survey, which should also be a warning to parents.

Of 1,501 youths interviewed for the survey, 19 percent who use the Internet regularly received unwanted sexual solicitations. And in 15 percent of those incidents, the solicitor tried to contact the child by phone or mail, the survey found.

The survey was conducted by the University of New Hampshire's Crime Against Children Research Centre.

But the revealing part is that online harassment is more likely to come from fellow youth than adults.

"Not all of the sexual aggression on the Internet fits the image of the sexual predator or the wily child molester,'' the authors state. "A lot of it looks and sounds like the hallways of our high schools.'' The report also concludes that perhaps the worst aspect of sexual solicitations is that "parents and reporting authorities do not seem to be hearing about the majority of the episodes''.

In addition, 25 percent of youth were exposed to unwanted online pornography and six percent were harassed in a nonsexual way. Only one-third of homes had filtering software in place to try and block some of the nasties from being viewed.

Even with its earnings warning last Friday, I bet many Apple fans who have stuck it out with the system are breathing a sigh of relief after the computer maker came through with a with a new Mac operating system (unveiled in Paris as the Mac OS X).

Judging from the descriptions and the photographs of the new system, this is a great gamble by a company that has seemingly pulled itself back into a competitive position.

Many businesses and people, myself included, had given up on the system even though it was more user-friendly than Windows because there was a risk back in the 1990s when there was a real question about Apple's survival as a major player in the market. One of the problems was that as Apple sank below ten percent of the market more and more software companies were starting to ignore the Mac. Hence Apple was caught in a vicious circle -- the less software the less functionality....

Apple has seemingly solved the problem by putting a Unix system -- one used by many server applications -- behind the glitzy colours, making some of the most powerful server-side applications Mac-compatible.

"What do you get when you weld a sports car to a dump truck? You get the best of both worlds,'' according to MacWorld magazine.

Here's a scary forecast by eMarketer about our changing workplace. While no one can really claim to have a crystal ball about the Internet, eMarketer has taken some of the trends and estimates that the average work user will spend about 2.5 hours online during a day, 12 hours a week and 50 hours a month.

That's a huge chunk of working time.

About 73 percent of the adult online population has accessed the Internet from work at least once in the past year. Some 41 percent access the Internet primarily from the workplace but only 15 percent are exclusively workplace users. About 55 percent who use the Internet at work use it to write or receive e-mails, while 11 percent admitted visiting adult sites as well.

In his latest book "Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World'', master cryptographer Bruce Schneier says computer break-ins are inevitable. One of the main reasons is the vast amount of mistakes programmers make in writing code. There are an average of five to 15 bugs in every thousand lines of code, which means that Windows 98 is riddled with somewhere between 90,000 and 270,000 mistakes, according to his book.

Judging from the chapter excerpt that I've read, Mr. Schneier's book serves as a big warning to executives in charge of companies. The information is laid out plainly, making the book a nice if alarming read. You can judge for yourself in an excerpt in the October issue of Upside Today at www.upside.com.

Quote of the week "They're housewives and they're hackers,'' says Jim Hedgepath, founder of sewing pattern design shop Pegasus. The company sales have dropped 40 percent since 1997. The drop is blamed on housewives who've taken the cue from their music swapping kids and are swapping the patterns over the Internet.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin yhotmail.com or (33) 467901474.