Female screennames riskier

Tell online girls you know that if they choose screennames that give away their gender, they're much more likely to get "threatening and sexually explicit messages," the Associated Press reports. The AP is citing a study by Michel Cukier, a professor at the University of Maryland's Center for Risk and Reliability. "In the study, automated chat-bots and human researchers logged on to chat rooms under female, male, and ambiguous screen names, such as Nightwolf, Orgoth and Stargazer. Bots using female names averaged 100 malicious messages a day, compared with about four for those using male names and about 25 for those with ambiguous names. Researchers logging on themselves produced similar results." Professor Cukier told the AP that writing software code that can tell the difference between male and female online shows the offending messages weren't automatically generated.