Month of Bugs for MySpace

Woohoo!  This is going to be fun.  Hackers gear up for month of MySpace bugs.  Mondo Armando and Müstaschio are going to be hacking away on MySpace next month and publishing security vulnerabilities.  I am very interested in seeing the results of their quest, but what does "monoculture-style danger of extremely popular Web sites" mean?

One definition says, "monoculture is defined as where everyone is wearing, doing, seeing, reading, watching and thinking the same thing".  Okay, that is kind of scary.  Several of my children are MySpacers.  They blog daily.  The chat with friends.  If they wonder what an old friend is up to, they search MySpace.  They generally find the old friend.  MySpace is an amazing networking site.

Our children are too young to remember Jim Jones and the cult settlement called Jonestown.  According to Wikipedia, "In the summer of 1977, Jones and most of the 1,000 members of the Peoples Temple moved to Guyana from San Francisco after an investigation into the church for tax evasion was begun. Jones named the closed settlement Jonestown after himself. His intention was to create an agricultural utopia in the jungle, free from racism and based on quasi-communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as the incarnation of Christ and God. His followers were known to perform sex acts on him in front of the entire congregation. While the children watched, they were fed LSD and psychoactive mushrooms, creating a feverish psychedelic environment."

The correlation is that MySpace is powerful in some people's lives, influencing their thinking.  It could be considered "cultish".  It's not hard to see how someone could influence the thinking of our young people by using a medium such as MySpace.  Maybe Mondo and Müstaschio aren't thinking in this extreme, but the words "monoculture-style danger" brought the idea of a cult to my mind and that is certainly something I would want to warn my children about.  Next month should be interesting.