There was a time when people cared a lot about the microprocessors in their PCs–a bit like teenagers once bragged that their Impala had a 450-horsepower V8 engine under the hood. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) seems to be betting those days are over.

The Silicon Valley company–perennial underdog to Intel (INTC) in the microprocessor wars–has been sending out signals that it wants to move away from marketing such chips based on how fast they are. Leslie Sobon, vice president of worldwide marketing, argues in an interview this week in TG Daily that customers don’t need to know that kind of techie stuff–what’s more important is what a PC with one of its chips does, what chores it’s best suited for. A new marketing campaign based on that concept, dubbed Vision, is expected to be announced Thursday.

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From behind their bedroom doors, more than 1 out of every 10 teenagers has posted a nude or seminude picture of themselves or others online–a “digital tattoo” that could haunt them for the rest of their lives, according to a poll being released today.

Aside from the nudity, the survey also found that at least a quarter of the young people polled had posted something they later regretted, made fun of others or created a false identity online.

While teens are spending more and more time on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace–with 22 percent saying they check their sites more than 10 times a day–they don’t seem to be aware of the long-term personal havoc they could create with a click of a button.

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Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel–and it’s not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?

This week a big piece of research has come up with two startling conclusions–that illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.

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While 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter, according to a new survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network.

This is consistent with what some observers have said about Twitter’s recent push from early-adopter territory into the mainstream: That it’s catching on with a slightly older demographic than the teenagers and college students who formed Facebook’s initial core.

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It seemed like more troubling evidence that kids these days engage in behavior they wouldn’t want to write home about. Researchers recently found that one in five teenagers have shared nude or seminude photos of themselves by cellphone or online.

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Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing Boing:

“This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan. He’s 13, he’s holding a game controller and looking at a glowing screen and he’s doing what he does a lot of–diving into digital realms of adventure.

His latest favourite game is Call of Duty–which he plays online with his friends. Evan’s wanting to play C of D was something of a challenge for us. It’s rated T and he’s only just a teenager, and point-and-shoot first person games worry me some. Evan is relentlessly reasonable sometimes–he outlined why he wanted to play the game and he was pretty upfront why he knew my “parent-sense” would start tingling. So I had to be reasonable too. I looked at the game. I’ve done a lot of research for military museums so I could tell that the content was accurate–but there was lots of shooting and blowing things up. But there was a fair bit of that during World War II. So it was undeniable that Evan was experiencing history and there was this teamwork factor…

So we compromised. Well, sort of.

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Computer security professionals say many net forums are populated by teenagers swapping credit card numbers, phishing kits and hacking tips.

The poor technical skills of many young hackers means they are very likely to get caught and arrested, they say.

Youth workers added that teenagers getting a criminal record would be putting their future at risk.

“I see kids of 11 and 12 sharing credit card details and asking for hacks,” said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at FaceTime Security.

Many teenagers got into low-level crime by looking for exploits and cracks for their favorite computer games.

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Online bullying could be more pervasive than you think.

Three out of four teens were bullied online over the last year, according to a study released this week by psychologists at the University of California at Los Angeles. And while that number may seem high at the outset, only 1 in 10 of those kids told their parents or another adult about it, the study showed.

The anonymous Web-based study surveyed 1,454 kids between the ages of 12 and 17. Of those, 41 percent reported between one and three cyberbullying incidents during the year; 13 percent reported four to six incidents; and 19 percent reported seven or more. In other words, no longer are victims of bullying relegated to the geeks and nerds of yore when it comes to the Internet.

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