NEWS from ni channel(www.2ch.net)

National exam-related info appears on Net before tests
2005.01.18

Information relating to national English and Japanese examinations for entry into universities and colleges appeared on an Internet bulletin board before the exams were held, it has been learned.

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has ordered the National Center for University Entrance Examinations, which conducts the tests, to conduct an investigation.

The messages appeared on the "Ni Channeru" (Channel 2) Web site, Japan's biggest Internet bulletin board.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on Jan. 15, a thread with the Japanese title "Hello, this is Pat's Brother Kevin," was set up on the bulletin board. At the beginning of the thread was an English message in Japanese characters that said, "Hello, my name is Kevin."

On the same day, about eight hours later, a character named Kevin appeared in a question in the national English examination. The question contained the phrase "Hi, my name is Kevin."

The following day, just before 1 a.m., a posting on an online bulletin board discussing the exam problem said, "The novel is by Shusaku Endo."

About nine hours later, Shusaku Endo's novel "Nikushin Saikai" was taken up in two Japanese examinations. Afterwards, many messages were posted on the bulletin board citing a possible leak.

Ministry officials said it was unlikely that information from the examination had been leaked.

"The questions are strictly controlled. A leak is unthinkable in the first place," a ministry official said. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Jan. 18, 2005)

A university student who posted a message on an Internet bulletin board in the name of Osama bin Laden, threatening to blow up Tokyo Tower, has been arrested, police said.

Police arrested the 19-year-old, first-year university student on suspicion of forcible obstruction of business.

Investigators said the student posted a message on the "Ni Channel" Internet bulletin board on Sept. 9, going by the name Osama bin Laden.

The message, which was written in English, threatened to blow up Tokyo Tower, Kasumigaseki, Akihabara and other places on Sept. 11. Police have charged the student with obstructing business of the company that manages Tokyo Tower.

The student has reportedly admitted writing the message from his computer at home. Police are investigating his motives for posting the message. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Nov. 21, 2004)

HIRATSUKA, Kanagawa -- An elementary school here cancelled afternoon classes after a worker found a message on the Internet threatening murder at the school, police said.

The Hiratsuka municipal board of education received an e-mail on Friday saying a threatening message had been posted on the Internet. A worker had found the message at about 8:30 a.m. on Friday and alerted police.

As a precaution, Hanamizu elementary school, which was the target of the threat, cancelled afternoon classes and sent students home together early. Police are searching for the author of the message, on suspicion of forcible obstruction of business.

Police and municipal education board officials said the message was posted on the major Ni Channel Internet bulletin board. It said, "Murder man visit -- I'm going to pay a call on Hiratsuka Municipal Hanamizu Elementary School in Kanagawa at 3 p.m. today."

About 30 police officers were dispatched to the area and they waited until after 3 p.m. but no suspicious people appeared.

School officials said workers would be placed on school routes at the beginning of next week to guard against any suspicious activity. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Oct. 16, 2004)

Online bulletin boards stalk Nagasaki killer

Online chat boards are being flooded with alleged photos and personal details of the 12-year-old killer of a 4-year-old Nagasaki boy, prompting authorities to ask website managers to delete about 1,100 messages in just over a week, the Mainichi has learned.

The Ministry of Justice has been monitoring threads concerning the Nagasaki child murder in Internet bulletin boards, including Ni Channel, Japan's biggest message site according to Japan Research Center Ltd., round the clock at its bureaus in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Nagasaki.

Anyone with access to the Internet can post messages on these sites and the amount of information about the 12-year-old killer, whose details are being withheld under the Juvenile Law, has skyrocketed since the junior high school boy was taken into custody on July 9.

The boy's mug shots, the name of his junior high school, and his parents have been exposed in the threads, according to Justice Ministry officials. Photos claimed to be that of the murderer's parents and the names of people totally unrelated to the case were also displayed online.

"We have never seen such a sudden burst of online information on just one case," a ministry official said.

Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama warned that online bulletin boards could become a hotbed for human rights violations.

"If the boy paraded (on the Internet) has nothing to do with the crime, people who have posted the information could face defamation charges. It might also trigger harassment (of innocent people whose details have been displayed on the Net) and other forms of human rights abuse," Moriyama told reporters Friday.

The Juvenile Law prohibits "newspapers and other publications" from printing the names and photos of youth criminals but online bulletin boards are not subjected to the rule.

However, the ministry decided that human rights abuses on the Net could not be overlooked and have started asking website managers to delete offending messages.

The ministry's Nagasaki bureau alone has asked for 688 messages to be deleted before Thursday, but so far less than one-third of them have been removed from the public domain.

Online exposure of a youth criminal is not a new phenomenon -- the identity of a Kobe junior high school student who killed two minors and beheaded one of the victims in 1997 was made available on many Internet chat boards.

Moreover, victims are also suffering abuse on chat boards. Photos alleged to be those of four schoolgirls abducted and held captive by a suicidal man in a Tokyo apartment for four days were displayed on Ni Channel. It later turned out that the photos showed totally unrelated girls and were taken down.

Kodai Otani, head of the Investigation Division of the ministry's Civil Liberties Bureau, believe these incidents are the negative product of an information-based society.

"(These threads) are the negative product of a highly-sophisticated information society," Otani said. "People who write these messages can remain anonymous and they know they won't get hurt. It's a dark side to the wide availability of the Internet."

Ni Channel organizer Hiroyuki Nishimura explained in his mail magazine about his site's rules for deleting messages.

"The rules for deleting messages are kept to the bare necessity. Those displaying telephone numbers, exposing privacies of individuals and those actually affecting people's lives will be deleted but the writer (Nishimura) may not be able to hand objective judgment beyond that," he wrote. "So it is left to a neutral third person to decide. And the only neutral third person in Japan is the courts." (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, July 19, 2003)

Teacher shows photo of alleged child-killer to class

FUKUSHIMA -- A "human-rights" teacher at a local junior high school is in hot water for circulating a photo of what was believed be the 12-year-old alleged murderer of 4-year-old Shun Tanemoto during civics lessons, it was learnt Sunday.

The unnamed teacher in his 30s at the Fukushima Municipal Dai-san Junior High School reportedly used a printout from the notorious .....Ni Channel....... online bulletin board to show students "an example of human rights violation" where the identity of an underage culprit protected under the law was revealed via the Internet.

One photo, allegedly of the young suspect, appearing on an Internet site last week has proven to be that of another boy not related to the crime.

He has apologized to Principal Kazuhiko Mineshima, admitting his actions were "inappropriate."

Shinya Suzuki, head of the Fukushima Municipal Government's education section, expressed his regret over the incident.

"Whatever his motives for doing this, the teacher's actions were a violation of human rights and were inappropriate. It is extremely disappointing," Suzuki said.

The teacher circulated the photo of a boy, who was temporarily paraded on the Ni Channel site as the 12-year-old junior high school student currently being held at a Nagasaki remand home over the vicious murder of Shun, during civics lessons for three third-grade classes on Friday.

School officials learnt of the incident the following day after students' parents complained.

Mineshima and the teacher explained the matter and offered their apologies to the students' families during a special meeting held Sunday. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, July 13, 2003)

A CLASSIC ONE.. TORTURE CAT:

Mutilated cat pics posted on top site
FUKUOKA -- Photos of mutilated, abused and slaughtered cats were posted for hours on Ni Channel, one of Japan's largest Internet chat sites, police said Thursday.

With the reach of animal abuse laws not extending to photos of persecuted creatures, police are powerless to do anything about the posted photos unless the person who put them on the site was responsible for the attacks on the cats.

Lawyer Masaki Kido said that while unfortunate, the photos were part and parcel of the Internet.

"The Internet is a system that permits humans total freedom of expression and that can have good and bad results," he said. "How far expressions of cruelty can be regulated is a matter that will have to be decided somewhere along the line."

Police said the photos were posted on the "I hate Pets" section of Ni Channel from 11 p.m. on May 6 to 3 a.m. on May 7.

The photos were horribly graphic. One had a cat strung up by a nail driven through its neck. Another showed the equipment used to sever a cat's tail. Yet another picture featured a cat that had been drowned in a home bath. Police believe the photos were sent from somewhere in Fukuoka. (Mainichi Shimbun, May 9, 2002)

    "I wanted to be a star on the Net,"
yeah, yeah. INTERNET - SERIOUS BUSINESS
Cat abuser pinched after posting images on Net
2002.05.22

FUKUOKA -- A man who posted photos of a mutilated cat on one of Japan's largest Internet chat sites was identified and will face charges, police said Wednesday.

Documents were sent to prosecutors Wednesday, accusing the unnamed Fukuoka man of breaking the law banning cruelty to animals.

"I wanted to be a star on the Net," the 26-year-old unemployed man was quoted by police as saying. "I have always hated cats since I was a kid because they always relieved themselves in my garden." However, he reportedly showed remorse. "I never expected to cause such a big furor. I want to say sorry to everyone." The man added that the mutilated cat is alive despite losing its tail in the vicious attack. "I released it."

The man reportedly picked up the cat on the streets and was feeding it at first.

However, he unleashed gruesome attacks against the cat after it "soiled" his room, police said. He then posted the photos -- including images of the cat after he severed its ears and tail and hung it with a piece of wire -- on the "I hate Pets" section of the Ni Channel chat site for four hours from 11 p.m. on May 6.

Police traced the unemployed man by studying Internet provider records. (Mainichi Shimbun, May 22, 2002)

Thousands of e-mail death threats directed at a professional mah-jongg player flooded one of Japan's most traveled Internet sites just hours after she won a defamation case against the site's operator, the Mainichi has learned.

Kaori Shimizu was forced to flee for her life in the wake of the online attack sparked by her legal win over the operator of the Ni Channel bulletin board.

Shimizu, 30, sued Nishimura after comments appeared on Ni Channel saying that she had undergone too many cosmetic surgery operations. Shimizu won the case on June 25, when the Tokyo District Court ruled that it was not possible to judge that she had undergone cosmetic surgery.

Within hours of the ruling, thousands of threatening and defaming messages directed against Shimizu were posted on Ni Channel. A simultaneous attack on her mah-jongg club's website shut it down. Some of the messages read: "I'm going to beat you to death;" "Beware of walking dark streets;" and "You hideous cosmetic surgery monster."

Administrators of her mah-jongg club's website were also slammed with over 100,000 spam messages, forcing them to shut down the site.

But the man who lost to Shimizu in a Tokyo District Court battle has also come out fighting, saying the mah-jongg pro was greedy and deserved all she got.

Shimizu's lawyer, Naru Nakajima, delivered a scathing attack on the anonymity provided by the Internet, implying that it allows offenders to avoid prosecution perpetually.

"Since all the threats came when we won the court case, I have been thinking of new laws that need to be put in place. Messages can be sent over the Net anonymously, which makes their damage more serious than normal defamation," Nakajima said. "We need to set up an independent third party that can collect and administer information received and only allow messages to be posted once they have gone through this third party."

Hiroyuki Nishimura, the administrator of Ni Channel who was forced to pay 1 million yen in compensation and remove defamatory messages from his site, had little sympathy for Shimizu, just one of many who have sued him over comments placed on the site.

"She didn't only want the messages about her removed, but initiated the legal proceedings because she sought to take money off the operators of the site. I think that really upset the general users of the site who don't know Ms. Shimizu," Nishimura said, adding that he also had problems with defamation laws, though not seeing things from Nakajima's viewpoint. "Existing laws were drawn up with publishers and readers in mind. They probably don't take into account such media as bulletin boards."

Shimizu's home address had also been listed on Ni Channel, forcing her to flee to her parents' home. She is unable to turn up to the mah-jongg club where she is the club professional because of fears that someone will carry out their threats.

Nishimura, whose site gets the traffic and following capable of unleashing such an attack, has paid heavily for the freedom that has made Ni Channel famous in Japan. He lost defamation suits in December last year and again in July, while another company sued him in May, demanding 10 million yen in compensation for what it says were inflammatory comments made about it on the site he runs. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Aug. 13, 2003)

Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2
Channel 2 -- Japan's most popular Web site -- gives people an anonymous way to vent their feelings. It also gives them a way to report news the media won't touch: Posters have repeatedly broken stories that were later followed by the mainstream press.
Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?

A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.

If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
Q: What do you think of Channel 2's influence on journalism?

A: We once could only get information through mass media filters, such as newspaper companies or TV stations. We could send a letter with some kind of information disclosure to a newspaper, but whether they would pick it up in the papers depended on the editor's decisions. It can be said that only the information convenient to the media was reported.

However, there is a lot of interesting news that the mass media won't pick up. Let's say there is a person who wants to tell certain information, and then he posts it on Channel 2. If the news is really interesting, there should be people who are intrigued by it, then they will respond to it, getting more attention. It's the users who decide the value of the news on Channel 2.

There have been quite a few stories that the mass media picked up (from Channel 2) that became big stories. At the same time, Channel 2 has a role as an ombudsman, investigating mass media's reports. For example, some people objected to touching stories that TV stations reported, like "a female high school student started a social welfare business as a CEO," and "a brain-damaged boy developed an unusual talent, publishing books and poetry." They proved that mass media could make a mistake.
Q: How do you operate Channel 2?

A: Channel 2 is my personal Web site. But because we need to have contracts with companies, I launched a corporation, called "Tokyo Plus." At present, we rent 40 servers in California for $20,000 a month. We fund our site with advertising fees from companies on the site. In addition, we have a free provider service for members and publish the magazine "Channel 2 Plus," both of which are small businesses. And we have about 250 staffers who are working voluntarily.
http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php

>>8
dumb bitch got what she deserved

>>10
Seconded.

Honestly... if you poke a fucking beehive... prepare to get stung.