Hack-of-the-Day: Use Your Nintendo DS to Harm Children

If you live in Philadelphia, your 11 o'clock news tonight promises to be all kinds of awesome. Specifically, there's going to be a story called: Is the Nintendo DS connecting your child with Strangers?

The answer, of course, is "no, actually, it isn't" but the hell with that -- not when there's NEWS to be made! Anybody who has tried Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection knows that safety concerns have caused Nintendo to basically gimp the whole thing, leaving absolutely no way to chat with your opponents (Mario Kart) or only letting you chat with people you've already met (Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime Hunters). Potential online predators: foiled!

Or so you would think. In fact, sketchy old men Brandon and Frank over at GameSetWatch have produced, by way of response, a handy guide to preying on teens with a DS. Example:

A potential dangerous chatroom lurer could post an ad on CraigsList asking children to email him or her to exchange Animal Crossing friends codes. Once the friends code exchange is made, the child can visit the stranger's town and chat, awkwardly, one slow and character-limited line at a time. By the time the child has picked all of the stranger's fruit, bought out the shop, trampled a few flowers and left, the stranger might, in theory, be able to say "what are you weari-"