Internet bullying might be decreased… if the Missouri Legislature has anything to say about it, that is. A new bill, which was passed by an overwhelming margin in both houses, makes it possible for the state to prosecute those who use electronic devices to harass others. Previously, the harassing statement had to have been hand written or made in a phone conversation. This expansion of the law, is the direct result of the death of Megan Meier, a thirteen year old girl who committed suicide after being harassed on MySpace. The bill is currently awaiting the approval of Governor Mark Blunt.

Elsewhere, Czech developer Grisoft has released AVG 8.0 Free Edition, the latest in the popular line of anti-virus protection. Like its previous incarnations, AVG 8.0 Free removes all of the extraneous programs and tools that most users ignore, choosing instead to focus on what it does best: virus protection. While the aforementioned “bells and whistles” are available, the user will have to pay for them. We suggest sticking with the Free edition and using other freely available programs such as Ad Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Hijack This to remove the nasties AVG overlooks.

If you still crave more free security, we’ve got a link that will show you how to encrypt your Gmail account. It’s pretty straight forward- you just need to download the free GPG application and the encryption plugin for Firefox. After that, you can send and receive encrypted messages with Gmail. And there’s a bonus — at the end of the article there is a link that shows you how to encrypt Mac’s Mail program as well.

Next, YouTube has expanded its Insight application with demographic reports. Insight is the recently released addition to the YouTube control panel that allows you to track who sees your videos and when. Now you can easily track who’s viewing your videos based on age, gender, or a combination of the two, in addition to the previously implemented geographic metrics.

And finally, Abobe has released an update to its Flash Player. Version 10 now supports Linux and sports an improved interface . Most of the improvements are made for developers — perhaps most noticeable for the end user is the speed increase, giving any website that uses Flash a noticeably faster load time.