RedLightCenter.com is more than your typical high-power adult dating site. Sure, there are lots of photos of women and men in various states of undress, and there's e-mail, ratings, an events calendar of band parties, open nights at bars, and sex-talk Internet radio shows. Besides all that, Red Light Center also has a multiuser virtual-reality system filled with naked and semi-naked avatars, bar scenes, pickup lines, and places to sneak off and have virtual sex.

Yes, virtual sex. The kind of virtual sex for which you type on your keyboard and your animated graphics character gets animated in 3-D with other characters right there on your computer's screen (provided you're running Windows, of course).

But Red Light Center caters to other pleasures, or vices, too. Starting today, you'll be able to use your PC to enter a virtual rave and take virtual ecstasy, smoke a virtual joint, and even munch on some virtual mushrooms. The target market is illegal-drug virgins who want to find out what's going on without upsetting their brain chemistry (or risking failing a drug test).

Curious, I signed up for an account at Red Light Center and conducted an e-mail interview with Brian Shuster, CEO of the website's parent company, Utherverse.

Technology Review: Why do you believe that virtual drugs will make people less likely to experiment with drugs in real life?

Brian Shuster: First drug use rarely occurs in a vacuum. Rather, it is a social phenomenon brought on by peer pressure. In a virtual environment, the pressure shifts from trying actual drugs to experimenting with virtual drugs. Thus, users have a safe platform to explore the social aspects of drug use, without having to risk doing the actual drugs.

By separating the social pressure from the real-world application, users have a totally revolutionary mechanism to deal with peer pressure, and actually to give in to peer pressure, without the negative consequences.

Moreover, users of virtual drugs have reported the effects of these virtual drugs to be surprisingly realistic and lifelike. To the extent that users can enjoy both the social benefits of virtual drugs as well as the entertainment associated with drug use, all with no actual drug consumption, the value of taking actual drugs is diminished.

Hopefully the people who are making these reports are not one-time drug virgins for whom Red Light Center was a "gateway" to the real stuff, but longtime users who are now using technology to help kick their chemical habits.

TR: Do you have any evidence to back this up?

BS: To this point, the evidence is, as Albert Einstein might say, all the result of thought experiments. Virtual ecstasy has not been released to the public and is making its world debut on April 20. Virtual marijuana and mushrooms have only recently been introduced for users to try, so there has not yet been an opportunity to perform studies.

Utherverse is, at this time, however, investigating a study to determine if smoking virtual cigarettes can enhance traditional stop-smoking measures to assist smokers in their efforts to quit. We hope to run a scientifically founded study later this year.

TR: Wouldn't virtual drugs make users more likely to want to try out drugs in real life?

BS: We hope that by preparing people to deal with peer pressure by allowing them to go through a virtual dry run, they will be better equipped to make rational decisions if the situation later occurs in their real life.

Just as with the sexual experimentation within Red Light Center, users will have the ability to decide for themselves whether using drugs is an enhancement or detriment to their life experience, even before ever using drugs in the real world. Armed with that information, they can then make more-rational decisions if they are confronted with that choice in the real world because they will have already gone through it virtually.

That said, it is critical to recognize that users who develop a full social circle within Red Light Center will have an online support structure of friends. Being accepted into a social community and having genuine friends are defenses that can be called on to prevent substance abuse in the real world. There is no reason to believe that this wouldn't hold true for online users, and thus provide them with additional deterrence to ongoing real-world drug use.

Finally, as users attend more events and social functions online, the exposure to situations that arise in the real world, whereby the user may be pressured into trying or using drugs, will naturally diminish. Thus, by reducing the real-world exposure to peer-pressure situations and moving those situations to a safe, online environment, first-use [experimental] drug use resulting from peer pressure would naturally decline.

Of course, opponents of virtual drugs would counter that by providing a positive drug experience online, users would then be inclined to have a positive feeling about drugs and would be more inclined to experiment with them in the real world. To that I would respond by saying that if it is true that getting a positive reward for virtual behavior inclines someone to that behavior in the real world, well, drugs aren't the big problem. Violent video games would be much more of a concern. Unspeakably violent video games have been rewarding players for violence for decades in the name of good old-fashioned entertainment. If opponents believe that giving users a nice high in a game will make them want to do drugs in the real world, how could they permit games that give users a high from killing and maiming other users? The answer is that they must believe that in-game rewards don't really result in real-world actions. We feel the same logic holds true for virtual drugs.

TR: RedLightCenter.com states that it is only for adults, not for children. Will there be a virtual drug area for children? My best friend in high school turned on to pot, cocaine, LSD, and psychedelic mushrooms when we were in 10th grade. If we follow your logic, it seems to me that if virtual drugs are a good intervention, waiting until someone is 18 is too long.

BS: For various reasons, Red Light Center will not be made available to minors, nor do we have any plans or intentions to permit minors to use our software at any point in the future.

Although as an intervention tool Red Light Center would probably be valuable as you imply, real-world politics and situations simply make this an unrealistic option.

However, to the extent that many drug users have not used destructive drugs before they are 18, and to the extent that Red Light Center can provide an alternative outlet to real-world drug use beyond deterring first experimentation, there is still a lot of value, even if it is limited to [those] 18 years or older.

And, of course, we aren't putting this product out as a way to stop drug use. That's simply a side effect. We are putting out virtual drugs because they are fun and because they make our parties much better!

Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter S. Mossberg is fond of saying that Macintosh users don't need antivirus software. For example, in today's column about "craplet" software on new PCs, he writes,

"An excellent way to avoid or minimize the craplet problem is to simply buy an Apple Macintosh computer. New Macs don't have any craplets displayed on their desktops. On a new Mac, no third-party software is automatically launched when you start the computer, and you don't need antivirus or antispyware programs because the Mac is essentially free from those menaces."

I agree with Mossberg that antivirus software isn't needed for the Mac today. Nevertheless, I run antivirus software on my Apple MacBook laptop. I've also recommended to my father that he run antivirus software on the Mac Mini that he has at his home.

I run antivirus software on a computer that doesn't need it to protect myself against a legal risk, not a technical one, since I use my Mac for Web banking. There is a risk to Web banking, of course. One of those risks is that somebody will get your password and drain your account. These days, many brokerage firms that offer Web banking have some kind of guarantee in which they promise that they will reimburse you for any money lost as a result of unauthorized transactions. But there is a hitch: they will only reimburse you if you are running antivirus on your computer.

For example, Schwab's privacy policy (revised July 1, 2006) states that customers should keep their computer and browser software current with security updates, install and update antivirus and antispyware software, and use a personal firewall. Apple's Mac OS has a built-in firewall, but it doesn't have built-in antivirus or antispyware software. So if you were using Schwab and lost money for some reason, Schwab wouldn't have to honor its guarantee if you were not running antivirus. My brokerage company has a similar policy.

This policy is not just for Web banking. One of the organizations where I work demands that I have antivirus installed on my computer before I put that computer on the company's local area network (LAN). Not having antivirus installed is a security offense.

What's truly ironic here is that the antivirus programs on the Mac spend most of their time looking for PC viruses, not Mac viruses. That's because, as Mossberg points out, there are few, if any, actively rampaging viruses that affect Mac users. It's tempting to think that this is because the Mac is a superior operating system, but it's really just because the Mac is the minority. If Apple ever gets popular--really popular--then we're sure to see spyware and viruses on the Mac, just as we see them on other computer platforms.

Indeed, I have seen spyware-like programs on the Mac before. A few years ago, my wife had her Mac's Web browser loaded up with toolbars and other "helpful" programs that monitored every website she visited and sent this information back to a few large corporations in California that used them for marketing purposes. Such programs are widely available today. Download them onto your Mac, and you, too, can have a Mac that's filled with spyware.

The April 5 issue of the blog the Consumerist has an interesting article about a significant data-privacy issue that has long been ignored. In the article, reader Chris wrote to the Consumerist about a problem she (or he?) was having with an Apple laptop. Apple wants to replace the hard drive, and Chris wants the hard drive back because the old, broken drive has confidential information on it. The problem is that Apple's policy (and most other companies') is not to return the dead hard drives of computers being serviced. So Chris needs to trust that Apple will properly destroy the drive, or at least its data, and Chris isn't so sure.

Chris isn't the first person to experience this problem, of course; it's quite common. A few years ago, my company had a laptop that was filled with confidential information. The hard drive died. We called up Dell for a replacement, but Dell wouldn't ship a new one unless we promised to send back the old one. And, obviously, with all the confidential information on the hard drive, we wouldn't send it back, either broken or intentionally damaged. So we ended up buying a new hard drive, even though the drive was still under warranty.

What's to be nervous about? Well, there are many documented cases in which a reputable service center nevertheless allowed the data from a customer's machine to leak back into the datasphere. Last year there were reports in the media about a hard drive that had been taken to a major electronics store for warranty repair, and it ended up being sold (with most of its data intact) at a swap fest.

When I was working on my PhD thesis, I spoke with a system administrator for a major electronics firm. The firm had a RAID array with a bad power supply. It sent the RAID array back to the manufacturer and was shipped a replacement. A few months later the firm got a phone call from a university: "Hey, we got your data!" Apparently, the university had also sent back a RAID array for service, and it had been sent the first array, refurbished with a new power supply, but with the original data still intact.

Also while working on my PhD thesis, I found a firm in California that did service for major computer manufacturers. Originally, the firm had a policy of wiping the "broken" drives before selling them on the secondary market. I bought a bunch of drives from the firm via eBay and was pleased to discover that they had all been blanked. But a year later, I bought another drive from the firm and discovered that it was filled with the original customer's data. A bit of Web searching revealed that the service firm had run into financial troubles between the first and second sales.

There is no good way to ensure that hard drives returned for service aren't going to have their data leak out. Because of this, individuals and businesses returning their drives for service must take precautions to make sure they don't have confidential data on them to start with. One way to do this is by using cryptographic file systems like Apple's File Vault. These systems assure that all of the confidential data on the drive is encrypted: even if the service center gets your data, it won't be able to make sense of it.

What's the other alternative? To make hard drives so cheap and easy to replace that there is no incentive to fix them. Although it's difficult to get the hard drive out of my MacBook, replacing the drive in that Dell was downright easy--it just slid out. And these days, you can get a really nice laptop drive for about $70--not much more than it costs to send a laptop twice across the country by next-day delivery. Make it easy to replace the drive and rebuild the operating system, and it's going to be cheaper for companies like Apple to just sell warranty customers a new hard drive at a discount than to worry about getting back the old drive to verify that the "warranty repair" was really justified.