The spread of the Internet has made it much easier for young people to come into contact with obscene harmful information. The appearance of smartphones which are not always effective at filtering out such information supports this tendency, and new measures to counter this threat are urgently needed. This paper reports on the latest trends in research from abroad on mass communication effects which deal with sexually harmful information, and analyzes the special characteristics of the effects such information may have over the Internet and the limits of these study.
It is suggested that obscene information is not always harmful, but that what makes it harmful is whether images of sexual violence are depicted and how it shows the reaction of the woman who is involved. We must pay more attention to the actual situation caused by the characteristics of the Internet, including the development of computer graphics and the interactivity of community sites.
As there is a limit to how far we can depend on only technical regulation for measures to counter obscene harmful information on the Internet, we must consider new legislation and hope for better media literacy education at home and at school which allows young people to critically understand the potential distortions of sexually obscene information and the special dangers of the Internet.

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In recent years, with the spread of social networks on the Web, some forms of Web information have become popular very rapidly. For example, with the influence of Twitter and social bookmark services, there is an increasing tendency for information to surge in popularity in short bursts. When it is no longer of interest, much of this information becomes useless and information with a short shelf-life is increasing rapidly.
Thus, we think that indicators of how long information has been used for are becoming more and more important. In this paper, we therefore propose a method for calculating how long information has been used for and a way of retrieving information which has been used continuously for a long time. In addition, we have developed a system for retrieving search keywords which have been used over a long period of time. The system uses time information of how long keywords have been used in Web searches.

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Formerly, people with visual disabilities accessed printed information using books in Braille or audio books prepared by welfare organizations or volunteers. IT technology made this process more efficient with the automation made available by scanners and OCR software. However, due to the time- and cost-consuming nature of the process, people with visual disabilities still cannot access books in a timely way.
The situation may be greatly improved by the advent of e-books equipped with screen reader software or other applications using synthetic speech technology, raising hopes that disabled people would soon be able to read newly published books simultaneously with the non-disabled. In fact, in the U.S., many digital books purchased with Kindle (Amazon) or iPad (Apple) devices are fitted with the readaloud function; in Japan, however, digital books are not yet suitable for practical use.
This paper evaluates the text-to-speech function for visually disabled people currently available in Japan and analyzes the tasks that need to be addressed to create an accessible environment for the era of digital publishing.

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