Q would never have allowed this

(A huge thanks to Guarav for this one!)

It's like a horrible, fun-house mirror image of that scene from Goldfinger, where Bond is driving through the Swiss countryside, tracking his nemesis with a little in-dash radar screen that eerily beeps the entire time.

Only now, as with so much of the Bond gadgetry, the eternal pursuit of the future has gotten into the hands of children, and the hands of those who prey on them. According to a new article from the Associated Press, AOL plans to release a downloadable new feature for their AIM chatting, the ominously-titled Skyhook. The feature enables chatters to locate their conversation partner physically via an online mapping system.

"So what," you say. Shouldn't people already know where their friends are? After all, this is the age of WiFi, crime-deterrant street cameras, and 12 year-olds with cellphones. This is hardly a Jetson's leap.

Yet, as Guarav correctly pointed out, this seemingly innocuous little widget only allows those same little 12 year olds to make themselves an even faster victim of online predators. These disgusting people already have a tendency to spend too much time in front of computers, so I don't imagine it's a stretch of the imagination to suppose that one or two of them have the computer know-how to hack into a Skyhook signal and find out where their target is located. Not to mention that fact that young children are often all too willing to give up personal information anyway. Adding an undesirable as a friend on AIM, or whatever they're using, might not be given a second thought.

It's a scary world.