Last week, a Los Angeles judge rejected claims by parents of four teenage girls who sought damages from MySpace because their daughters were sexually assaulted by men they met on the social network.

The parents sought to have MySpace take steps to secure the network for children.

In light of that news, parents who fret about their pre-teen daughters meeting perverts and other evil doers on Internet social networks may want to check out a new product that debuts today - a closed social network called My Secret Circle.

This network comes from Senario, an Illinois consumer electronics and publishing firm that is specifically targeting girls aged 8 to 12 - known to marketers as tweens.

To access the network, a girl has to plug in a USB drive that stores a unique access code. She can then invite any of her friends who have their own My Secret Circle drive to join a private network, where they can chat, share photos and play games.

The idea, says Senario CEO and founder Mike Nakamura, is to create a fun site that will entice young girls away from the dangers of public social networks until they are older and supposedly wiser. (Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have terms of service that prohibit children that age from joining, but they’ve also been known to register kids who lie about their age.)

“They’re jumping onto these social sites earlier than they should be,” Nakamura said. “We want to hold them back a little longer, maybe protect them a little longer.”

He acknowledges that his company faces a barrier by trying to sell a consumer electronics product that competes with joining a network for free. Plus, there has to be at least two people with My Secret Circle drives to form one connection and several more to create a workable network.

Senario is charging $19.99 for one My Secret Circle USB key, or a “B.F.F. Pack” with two keys for $29.99. They’ll be available later this month at tween retailer Justice stores, which took over the old Limited Too outlets.

“We hope that moms see the value of this closed network,” he said.

Brad Pitt was emotional but calm, Angelina Jolie laughed and chatted. The world’s most famous celebrity couple were joined in emotion during the birth of their twins - a boy and a girl - and all “are doing marvelously well,” the doctor who delivered the babies in a seaside hospital on the French Riviera said Sunday.

The newborns - Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, born one minute apart Saturday evening - are the ultimate million-dollar babies, with experts estimating their first photos will fetch a fortune.

 VISIT Disney’s California Adventure — a 55-acre theme park next door to the fabled progenitor of the modern amusement Mecca, Disneyland — and you will find a noisy reminder of what happens when a company loses its focus and cuts corners.The Walt Disney Company built the park on the cheap in 2001, and many rides are copies of familiar carnival workhorses like the Ferris wheel. A lack of landscaping can leave guests sweltering. Outdoor shows were borrowed from other Disney properties. And the theme, built around tributes to California, is modest except for an occasionally unintentional ghost-town atmosphere: The park draws about 6 million visitors a year, a trickle compared with the 15 million who swarm Disneyland.Now, Disney is embarking on a $1.1 billion, five-year effort to get California Adventure on track. The blueprints call for ripping out ho-hum rides and adding elaborate new ones, rebuilding the park’s entrance — a hodgepodge of turnstiles, a miniature Golden Gate Bridge and pastel tile murals — to shift the focus to Disney iconography.In June, Disney will unveil a glimpse of the shoot-for-the-moon bet it is making on California Adventure’s makeover, with the introduction of a ride called Toy Story Mania. More than three years in the making, and estimated to cost about $80 million, the attraction essentially puts guests inside a video game.Riders, wearing 3-D glasses, board vehicles that career through an old-fashioned carnival midway, operated by characters from the popular “Toy Story” film franchise. Vehicles stop at game booths — 56 giant screens programmed with 3-D animation from Pixar — and riders play virtual-reality versions of classic carnival games.But much more is riding on the attraction than a complex turnaround of just one theme park. Toy Story Mania, which Disney is also installing in Florida, reflects the larger pressures and challenges facing the company’s $10.6 billion parks and resorts business. To stay relevant to younger, digitally savvy visitors while also delivering growth to investors, Disney, the company that invented the modern theme park, knows that it has to devise a new era of spectacular attractions rooted in technology.One-upmanship increasingly drives this intensely competitive business, and Disney’s rivals are also trying harder to gain market share. Universal Studios, part of NBC Universal, has more than quadrupled its spending on new rides, introducing attractions in California and Florida that are based on “The Simpsons.” Universal is teaming up with Warner Brothers to bring a small Harry Potter-theme park to Florida in late 2009. Niche players like SeaWorld and Legoland are also muscling in on Disney’s territory.At its core, however, Toy Story Mania represents an effort to solve a puzzle that poses a much larger threat to Disney and the broader amusement park business. The quickening pace of daily living, advances in personal technology and the rapidly changing media landscape are combining to reshape what consumers expect out of a theme park, Disney executives say.Toy Story Mania, which carries a modest price tag compared with some other Disney efforts, demonstrates one way that the company is fighting back, said Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.“Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily the answer,” Mr. Rasulo said. “You want people leaving thinking, ‘Wow, only Disney could do that.’ ”Consumers’ fixation on instant gratification and personalization has been reshaping the entertainment industry for some time, but it has finally caught up to the theme park business in visible ways. For instance, Disney has spent much more effort — and money — developing ways to entertain people as they stand in line for Toy Story Mania.An animatronic figure with an estimated $1 million price tag will sing songs and interact with guests as they wait. Employees dressed as “Toy Story” characters will stroll among the crowds.“There’s an erosion of patience,” said Bruce Vaughn, the chief creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s development group. “People’s tolerance for lines is decreasing at a rapid rate.”Mr. Rasulo said that younger visitors, in particular, expect customized entertainment. So Toy Story Mania’s computers will accommodate riders of various skill levels.“Guests are pretty much no longer interested in being passive viewers,” Mr. Rasulo said.