Listing for Vietnamese women gets eBay boot
If you want to buy women from a third-world country, you’ll have to stick to back-page magazine ads. EBay Inc. said on Friday it had spiked a listing on its online auction web site that offered three young Vietnamese women for sale and will report the person who posted the listing to local authorities. EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the listing, which said the women could only be shipped to Taiwan, was a conspicuously bad violation of not only eBay policies but also the law. The online auction site has suspended the poster, who originally posted the women on eBay Taiwan. Durzy said he was not sure of the dates the postings appeared, but a screenshot of the listing provided by the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans showed that it was first posted on March 2. The group wrote to eBay asking that the item be taken off when it found out about it March 5.    

Europeans plan to protect kids from web predators
The European Commission has proposed a 50-million-euro plan to protect children from online pornography and sexual predators. The commission’s four-year program, known as Safer Internet Plus, attempts to zero in on the increasing dangers faced by children on the internet. The commission revealed a worrisome gap between children’s actual activities online and what their parents think they’re doing, after recent instances of children being kidnapped by adults they became acquainted with on the internet. It cited an EU survey last year that discovered 14 percent of children in northern Europe had met someone they had come across in a chatroom. However, only 4 percent of parents believed this to be true. The commission proposed that EU member states take action, urging EU countries to facilitate cooperation in international internet forums to raise awareness and fund telephone hotlines so the public can report malicious online content targeted at children.

FCC considers best way to slam cell spam
The national Do Not Call registry has been such a success that the U.S. government is searching for ways to end unwelcome intrusions on cellular phones. The Federal Communications Commission voted last week to begin a proceeding on this issue and is now looking for input on protecting mobile-phone users from spam and unsolicited telemarketing calls. The agency is searching for comments to help figure out how senders can comply with these rules. The specific concerns include whether there should be a list of domain names to help senders identify if a message is mobile commercial email, how subscribers will be able to avoid receiving mobile-service commercial messages without prior authorization, how they can specify if they don’t want to receive future messages, if commercial cell providers should be exempt from having to get prior consent before sending a commercial message to their customers, and what should be the “safe harbor” time period for telemarketers.