Takes on Tiger

The latest version of Apple's OS X (v. 10.4), nicknamed "Tiger," is being released today, so I thought you might appreciate a few tech journalists' reviews: Ed Baig at USATODAY, David Pogue at the New York Times, and Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. A few words to the wise: 1) If you already have a Mac and want to upgrade, Mossberg suggests you wait a few months for Apple to make some tweaks that will help Tiger work better on older, slower Macintoshes. 2) The new parental controls are fairly extensive, but no one should expect them to do their thing right out of the box - they'll need some configuring (e.g., choosing sites that little Web-sters can visit) and some considering (e.g., what controls are appropriate for each child).

IM anthropology: Virtual community of 11-15s

"I had the chance to observe an IM chat once," Dr. Robert Price told me in a recent phone interview. "It wasn't about anything; it wasn't a conversation. It was more like graffiti than a conversation." This observation of Haworth School's tech coordinator would probably sound about right to any adult observing middle-school students' instant-messaging conversations. When I watch a session of my 13-year-old's, it seems like a sort of digital snowball fight - a playful group experience with lots of what might be suggestive of communication - not apparently meaningful, yet *so* meaningful to the participants. IM-ing is a compelling, emotionally safe (somewhat) extension of middle-schoolers' budding social lives. Sometimes too compelling, some parents feel. But our kids' instant-messaging also offers insights into what they're dealing with at school and in their social lives, insights that might help us in our parenting. For more on this, please see this week's issue of my newsletter - and feel free to send comments or post below. I'd love to hear from fellow parents of IM-ers!

New law after uber file-sharers

Not all file-sharers will find life more difficult with the law President Bush just signed, but if they share a film, tune, or software program before it has been released, they could go to jail. "The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act also includes sections criminalizing the use of camcorders to record a movie in a theater, and authorizing the use of technologies that can delete offensive content from a film," CNET reports. Bush signed the law yesterday. Wired magazine's "The Shadow Internet" describes the kind of "file-sharing" this law's going after.

Kids need Net-literate parents: Study

"Parents who lack Internet skills could be damaging their children's education and job prospects," reports CNET, citing the just-released final report of the study "UK Children Go Online" at the London School of Economics. There are reams of arresting findings in this study (e.g., 46% of UK 9-to-19-year-olds have given out personal info online, 57% have run across online porn, 30% have "made an online acquaintance"), but much of the coverage zoomed in on this one about parents, the first connection I've seen a study make between parental Net literacy and children's futures. Eighteen percent of parents surveyed said "they don't know how to help their children use the Internet safely," study co-author Sonia Livingstone said. Here are the BBC and Silicon.com.

Digital music: More options

If there are online music fans at your house, they now have more options - including free *and* for-sure legal. This week RealNetworks unveiled the new Rhapsody, TIME.com reports, which includes Rhapsody 25 (listen to 25 songs for free on a PC); Rhapsody Unlimited ($10/month to "rent" unlimited songs, listen to them on your PC for as long as you're a subscriber; or 89 cents/tune or $8.99/album to "own" and listen offline on the PC); and Rhapsody to Go (for $15/month, listen online, offline, or put music on an MP3 player or burn a CD). The "free" category represents something of an alternative to illegal file-sharing: 25 free "plays" a month (whether 25 songs or 25 plays of the same song). Of course, there are still restrictions. The number of MP3 players Rhapsody's tunes can be played on is limited, though Real says it has made its service compatible with the iPod. "For the moment, Real says it only supports the Creative Zen Micro and the iRiver H10, but if you already own a Dell Pocket DJ or one of iRiver's H300 series players, my educated guess is that they could work, too." All this is a good sign that online music retailers are aware that flexible, fluid music consumption is the goal for all those music fans out there. More than 300 news outlets covered this - see also Internet News.

Spell 'Google' right!

Tell kids and students: Be careful how you spell "Google" if you're heading there to do a search. If you happen to type "googkle.com" and go to that site, it will automatically "download and install harmful Trojans and spyware on the computer of susceptible users," Techtree.com reports. It cites an alert from Finnish security firm F-Secure saying that "once a user's computer has been attacked by the malicious website, it installs several malware applications such as Trojan droppers, Trojan downloaders, backdoors, a proxy Trojan and a spying Trojan along with adware-related files, leading to the computer being infected by a host of viruses." Looks like what it *really* spells is "total PC meltdown"! Safe ways to go to Google: bookmark it, make it a "customized link" in Explorer, FireFox, etc., or use the Google search window in your browser or browser toolbar (for Explorer, you can download Google's own toolbar).

The Matrix as online game

Are their Matrix fans at your house? The Matrix Online (rated "Teen," or 13+) sucks up as many as 30 hours of every week in 26-year-old Christina Carkner's life, and she's just fine with that, the New York Times reports. So is Warner Bros. and the gaming industry. They're counting on the move of the massively popular Matrix film series to the online world to make MMPGs - massively multiplayer (online) games - a mainstream thing in the US, like it is in Korea and Taiwan, for example. Not that Christina's helping - she was already "deeply involved" in another MMPG called World of Warcraft but ran out of challenges in it (Christina's interesting - read more about her in the Times piece). "Unlike traditional video games, which have their roots in arcades, these games have more in common with role-playing pastimes like Dungeon & Dragons," according to the Times. That potentially makes them big moneymakers, because players get immersed and become willing to pay subscription fees of around $15 a month in addition to buying the software up front for $50-or-so (Sony expects EverQuest's sequel, which launched last November, to make $500 million in its first eight years). To see what The Matrix looks like, go to CNET.

Also from the "How They Might Spend Their Allowance Dept." - This says something about how immersive these games can be: Sony just unveiled an auction site for EverQuest II players to buy and sell virtual artifacts, CNET reports. It's called "Station Exchange" and, yes, that's real money for faux goods, such as an opportunity to buy that "Flaming Sword of Destruction" your Shadowknight always wanted.

TV makes us smarter?!

Now there's a twist! According to this New York Times Magazine article by Steven Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the human mind "likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system." And, Johnson says, TV's producers are meeting that demand because it's good business. He explains how. But, parents, if you read nothing else in the article, read the last two paragraphs. In the first he suggests that we reconsider "the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing." But his most interesting suggestion of all is that we see today's programming (maybe media in general) as an opportunity instead of a crisis: "The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play." I think, too, it's an opportunity for more, very rewarding, parent-child communication.

Kids seeking Star Wars games?

Ah yes, the marketing blitz for Star Wars Episode 3 continues and - for those of us hearing more about it from the gamers at our house than from the media even! - New York Times gaming columnist Charles Herold says there are two great game options for them. One is a role-paying game for Xbox called Jade Empire that isn't about Star Wars at all but is "instantly recognizable as a follow-up to Bioware's 2003 game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, with a similar interface and almost identical morality and dialogue systems." The other is more for kids and those who just love the Star Wars experience: Lego Star Wars, which "recreates scenes and events from 'Star Wars' Episodes I, II and the forthcoming III" in animated Lego-style, Herold writes. You can't die in the game, which is good for kids, but it's even "easygoing fun for adults with poor gaming skills ... who want to bond with their children by playing along [in] cooperative mode, which allows two players to go through missions together." Speaking of Jade Empire, the Times reports separately that a new language - Tho Fan - was developed just for the game. It "sounds ancient and distinctly Asian. Its "sh" sounds come from the back of the throat, as they do in Chinese. Its "r" sounds are made with a tap of the tongue, echoing Mongolian." And it was created by Wolf Wikeley, PhD candidate (with a weakness for Japanese animation and first-person-shooter video games) in the linguistics department at the University of Alberta.

Family sues P2P service

A family using the class-action process to sue, that is. This is the first report I've seen about parents of file-sharers suing a file-sharing, or peer-to-peer (P2P), service: "Couple plans suit in Web music case" at the Cincinnati Enquirer. Sally and Jim Wilson of Cold Spring, Ohio, were sued in February by the Recording Industry Association because, the RIAA said, their two teenage daughters had downloaded 653 songs illegally. The RIAA added that they "could be liable to pay $750 for each," or $490,000 if they lost the case in court (they settled with the RIAA for $3,000). They are now suing Kazaa, the P2P service their daughters used, basically for profiting from the ignorance of parents of file-sharers, according to the Enquirer. They're using the class-action method so that other parents who have settled with the RIAA will join them in the lawsuit (more than 10,000 people, not necessarily parents, have been sued by the media industry so far). Kazaa is reportedly on the decline among P2P services, but it's still widely used. "In October 2004 alone, approximately 2.4 million users of the FastTrack network, which includes Kazaa and Grokster, traded 1.4 billion files," according to RIAA data cited by the Enquirer. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this one out.]

New P2P-carried worm

There's a new P2P-carried worm kids and parents need to be on the alert for: Nopir.B. By "P2P-carried," I mean that it's spreading on file-sharing networks and infects Windows PCs when downloaded and run by file-sharers. Why would they do that? It's "designed to look like a DVD-cracking program," tricking file-sharers who are looking for software that circumvents copy-restriction technology on DVDs, ZDNET UK reports. What it really does is delete people's music libraries (all MP3 files on hard drives), as well as some P2P programs (e.g., LimeWire, Grokster, or Kazaa, but ZDNET doesn't say which ones). Sophos, the anti-virus firm that discovered the worm, says it thinks Nopir's creator is on some sort of anti-piracy mission. It's too early to tell how infectious this one will be, but apparently the family PC's safe if your anti-virus software is up to date. For another risk that just came up in tech news again last week, see "P2P's privacy problem."

Buying vs. sharing tunes

Apple's iTunes is two years old this week, and Rob Pegoraro, the Washington Post's tech writer, has spent "a fair amount of change" at iTunes since he first went there, he reports. "And yet millions of people still get their music online from a file-sharing service or site - and in the process, put up with an often dubious selection, spyware-ridden software, and the unpleasant reality that the artists who made that music won't make a cent off each such download." So he looks at why people put up with the downsides of P2P and what's still missing at "the legit online stores." Examples, no Beatles or Led Zeppelin in any of them, hardware (MP3 player) restrictions, and sharing/transferring tunes with/to friends. By spelling out these points that any of our kids could probably tick off in two seconds, Rob's providing us parents with some helpful insights into the online music world.

Kids' IM-ing: A teacher's view

In the past few years, Haworth Public School (K-8) in New Jersey has had assemblies and evening meetings with parents about Internet safety, but "sometimes those meetings are a little behind the times," Dr. Robert Price, the school's technology coordinator and a consultant for the makers of I.M. Control software, told me in a recent phone interview. Those meetings were about "chatting with strangers, inappropriate Web sites, filtering," he said. It's all good, but "IM is kind of outside that. You can talk to strangers in instant-messaging, I suppose, but I find kids don't want to do that. They want to talk to their friends in IM." That's just it. IM is not your typical online-safety issue. For a look at what it is, click to my newsletter this week.

P2P's privacy problem

This is not the first news about P2P's privacy risks, just the latest: A lot of people are inadvertently sharing their email address books on the file-sharing networks. If you have music fans at your house who are using P2P services like Kazaa, LimeWire, etc., this is one more way your family could be experiencing an online privacy breach. How? After it's downloaded, P2P software usually creates a shared media folder. File-sharers need to make sure all that's in there is what they *intend* to share - e.g., music files. Studies have shown that a lot more is being shared from family computers, such as emails or financial and medical records. Here's the latest study about spammers harvesting email addresses on P2P networks, as told by the BBC. Here's an earlier, more comprehensive study in 2002 at HP Labs and a 2003 report based on US congressional hearing, "Overexposed: The Threats to Privacy and Security on File-Sharing Networks." See also "File-sharing realities for families."

Earth Day & recycling computers

In honor of Earth Day - today - Dell and Hewlett-Packard are lowering the cost of recycling our computer hardware. HP is running a promotion through May 31 that reduces the price by half (fees range from $17 to $46 for monitors to printers), CNET reports. The promotion goes with "a rebate program that gives customers as much as $50 off the price of new HP equipment if they recycle old gear through the company. Dell has indefinitely dropped its fee, "now charging $10 to ship a PC to Dell for recycling; previously, the PC maker charged $15. The company continues to offer free recycling of old equipment for customers who purchase a replacement desktop or notebook system." For the big picture, see the Washington Post's "Finding a Home for Old Computers." For more on Earth Day 2005, click to the Earth Day Network and - for young environmentalists - Kid's Domain for Earth Day history, games, songs, and e-greetings.

UK teens' reasons for Net use

Homework is No. 1 (76%), followed by instant messaging (52%), for 13-to-18-year-old Britons who were asked their main reason for going online. Thirty-six percent said shopping was their main reason, 18% "news and current affairs," and "more than one in 10 teenagers frequently use the Internet to look at 'adult-only' Web sites," the BBC reports, leading with this last statistic (12%). The findings were part of this year's installment of an eight-year study (ending in '09) by the UK's National Foundation for Educational Research about "the effect of citizenship lessons - introduced across England - on children's development." The Register treated the news differently, leading with: "A UK government survey has found that just 12% of 13 to 18-year-olds avail themselves of 'adult-only' websites, preferring instead to use the internet to assist in doing homework or for news."

AOL fights phishing

Phishing - "one of the fastest growing online crimes," PCWorld reports - has a sizable new enemy. "America Online has begun a campaign to identify and block fraudulent Web sites that attempt to solicit personal information from visitors" with the help of online security firm Cyota, a provider of anti-fraud services to financial companies. They will "try to identify potential phishing sites and limit access to them" from within AOL (for customers who use AOL as their browser). What phishers do is convince people via email and IMs that they need to "update their account, click here" and thus send people to fake Web pages where bank or PayPal customers are told to type in their username, password, account no., etc., which the phishers can now add to their database of stolen personal information. AOL's in good company: "In February, Microsoft, EBay, and Visa International launched a program to share information about phishing attacks called the Phish Report Network," which now has more than 1,200 corporate members, according to PCWorld. For more on this (including help for non-AOL customers), see "To foil phishers," 12/17/04.

ID theft & online families

No surprise to anyone following tech news these days: On Diane Rehm's show on National Public Radio this week, Robert o'Harrow, Washington Post reporter and author of "No Place to Hide," said we're at a difficult intersection right now between incredible convenience and incredible vulnerability in terms of privacy. He was talking about the information on all of us that sits in businesses' computer databases, many of them connected to the Internet. The latest on this was the news this week that "information involving 1.4 million credit card and 96,000 check transactions" was stolen from computers at 108 DSW Shoe Warehouse stores, Reuters reported. The Associated Press added that the theft, which was 10 times greater than investigators originally estimated, "did not include home addresses or personal identification numbers." Earlier but recent personal data-theft reports involved other retailers and more famously LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, which, among other services, provide background checks on people.

How this relates to online families: working together to secure the personal info on our family PCs. Ideally, that involves family discussion about not ever sharing personally identifiable info (full name, address, school name, team name, phone no., etc.) in email, IM, blogs, Web sites, etc. For talking points, see this helpful primer on preventing ID theft at the Washington Post and Slate's "Has your identity been stolen?". One thing to keep in mind, as pointed out by Robert Douglas of PrivacyToday.com on NPR: The Internet is not the main problem with ID theft. Lost or stolen IDs like drivers' licenses, thieves riffling through trash, and lax business practices are bigger causes, he said. Teaching kids to protect their (and our) info online is just a good start as they develop critical thinking about what info they share online and offline.

Skype: More opps to chat with strangers

You could call it penpals on steroids - random phone calls from anyone, anywhere, enabled by free Net telephony provider Skype. In a fun New York Times article illustrating this, Net pundit and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow got a call from a woman in Vietnam who just wanted to practice speaking English. "They spoke for a long time, exchanging text, photographs and Web addresses, and discussing everything from the state of Vietnam's economy to Ms. My's father's time in the army." The Times adds that Mr. Barlow's experience wasn't unique. "Skype users report unsolicited contacts every day, and contrary to such experiences with phone and email, the calls are often welcomed." Now, it's probably a lot safer for your child to talk with someone in Southeast Asia than someone within a 100-mile radius for two reasons: 1) ill-intentioned strangers probably don't try to establish relationships with children when it would cost a fortune to meet them in person, and 2) parents can hear when a child's chatting by phone, which sometimes means a higher awareness level than with silent online chat. A third might be that your kid would have to turn the random-call feature, called "Skype Me," on, not that it's hard to do. So this is yet another way kids can meet and get to know strangers. Just a heads-up. [Skype facts: it's the most popular and one of the first of the current-generation VoIP (voice-over Internet protocol) providers, having just passed the 100 million-downloads mark, according to The Register; it's totally free if both users use a headset and have its software on their PCs; it's cheap if you use a phone; and it's brought to you by the people who created and later sold the Kazaa file-sharing service.]

Game consoles next for Playboy

Having launched "iBod" nude and non-nude photo galleries for the iPod Photo and other media players, Playboy's now moving on to PlayStation Portable with its photos of "female video game characters," CNN reports. But this won't be the first adult content on PSPs. "Within weeks of the PSP's launch, hackers figured out how to use the device as a Web browser. As proof of their success, many quickly began posting screenshots - with adult Web sites filling the screen." Playboy's editor told San Jose Mercury News columnist John Paczkowski that it just want to reach that significant intersection between Playboy fans and gaming enthusiasts. BTW, parents, PSP comes with parental controls, possibly because it connects to the Net. For a different angle on multiplayer gaming, see "Trash talk in online games."

Sober worm's back: Don't click!

A new version of a particularly nasty worm is back, with the mission of harvesting as many email addresses as possible, ZDNET UK reports. The creators of Sober.M want to sell our addresses to spammers. Tell your kids not to bother opening any email with the subject: "I've_got your EMail on my_account!" and definitely not to click on an attachment in it that's supposed to have copies of your email in it. The attachment is the worm, of course, and "when opened, the attachment scans files on the infected computer to harvest email addresses that enable the worm to spread," according to TechWorld.com. The other thing to do: Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date. McAfee, Symantec, etc. reportedly all have this one covered.

Your kids: What people see online

If you're a little concerned about what your child is saying about herself online - say, in her blog or Web site - it might help to show her this Washington Post piece. In it, writer Robert MacMillan describes a situation that led to a friend having embarrassing information about herself turn up in the first result of any Google search of her name. She cringed when she thought about "prospective employers 'Googling' her" and finding "a concise and prominent summary of her dating proclivities." Of course, if your daughter's smart, she'll tell you her full name is nowhere to be found in her blog, but it wouldn't hurt to be sure. If she's really young and into blogging, this might be helpful: "A dad on kids' blogs: How father & daughter worked through the issues." MacMillan goes on to say that a company called ZoomInfo is making a business of bumping those embarrassing tidbits down in Google's search results; see the piece to find out how they're doing that. For more serious examples of what kids are exposing about themselves online, see this item in my newsletter. See USATODAY's "Prying eyes are everywhere" for a round-up of current online monitoring, spying, and background-checking tools and behaviors.

Student tech support: Key in Ore.

More evidence that student techies are real assets to their schools: "The Silver Falls Technology Department supports all 14 schools in the district plus the administration department with only 2-1/2 full-time employees," according to the Silverton Appeal in Oregon. That simply would not be possible without the 16 high school and two Chemeketa Community College students in the "Technology Assistant" class that makes up most of that Tech Department. They're learning computer support, Web page support, video production and "eBay sales for the school district." They are also learning to be professionals at a young age and are treated as such.

Next-gen RFID includes privacy

The newest RFID tags will be out by next fall and, interestingly, will feature privacy technology, ZDNET UK reports. The technology is now reaching global standardization, which means it'll be adopted exponentially. As for the privacy tech in the new G2 (2nd-generation) chips, it involves "encryption, password protection, and authentication in order to protect the data stored on the RFID tags and their databases. That's good news in this climate of widespread identity theft and if schools try again to use this technology on student IDs. For recent news on RFID and kids, see my feature of that title in February. For dealing with ID theft, see the Washington Post's "Avoiding Identity Theft: A Primer" and "Has Your Identity Been Stolen? What to do if it happens to you" at Slate, now owned by the Post (formerly by Microsoft).

Tips from a tech-savvy dad, Part 2

This week's focus in my newsletter: instant-messaging. "Rachel," 11, does a lot of it with her friends. So I asked our Calif.-based tech executive and dad "Tom" (changing their names to protect Rachel's privacy) how he helps his daughter keep her IM experiences positive. He offered some precautions for fellow parents of young communicators - with a heads-up about "spim," the pesky new IM version of spam now coming to instant messenger users everywhere (this week Reuters had to shut down its whole corporate IM network because of a worm circulating via instant messages purporting to be from friends on people's buddy lists, ZDNET reported).

Number of young gamblers is up

The Internet reportedly has a role in increased gambling by young people. "For the first time, experts and treatment centers that deal with problem gamblers across the country are seeing an increasing number of adolescents who have developed serious gambling problems," the Christian Science Monitor reports. It cites the situation in Connecticut, where it was once rare for any gambling treatment center to have clients under 18. "Now, 11 youngsters are in formal programs getting help. And a youth gambling education group in Minnesota says it's seeing "a tremendous increase" in demand from schools and youth organizations "looking for tools to help kids deal with problem gambling." The Monitor points out two Web resources from the North American Institute for Training in Duluth, Minn., one for kids (WannaBet.org) and one for parents (NATI.org, with a fund of links to research on the subject).

iPods banned in Oz school

I've heard of school rules about cell phones, but this is the first case I've seen involving iPods. "The yuppie consumer gadget will not be permitted in class, because it encourages kids to be selfish and lonely, according to the school principal, UK-based The Register reports from San Francisco (a very international report!). "Principal Kerrie Murphy noticed that iPod-toting children were isolating themselves into a cocoon of solipsism." Sounds a little like what can happen on occasion at our house! Anyway, it's a thoughtful, rather irreverent piece about how technology can both enhance and limit our interaction with and openness to each other.

'Flashy' phones kids will love

More evidence that cell phones are the new (Net-connected) PCs: Macromedia's plans for phones with its Flash software. You see it on cell phones all over Asia, with their "colorful animation, games, and menu interfaces ... unlike anything seen in this country," USATODAY reports. "Today, the cell phone is a communication device, but several new models tout features such as instant messaging [also a communication device for teenagers!], games and the ability to listen to digital music and watch video clips. Such features are expected to become standard as cell phone models get much more powerful in coming years." Such features will also make cell phones - and the mobile Internet - even more appealing to kids and teens, presenting fresh challenges to parents who want them to have good experiences with the Net.

An example: "Edmonton, Alberta, Flash developer Grant Skinner ... foresees a time soon when a camera phone with embedded Flash software snaps a picture and instantly uploads it to the Internet, allowing for comments to be posted online and sent back to the phone." And some numbers: "About 1.6 billion cell phones are in use worldwide." Some 650 million were sold last year (only 199 million in '04), with a projected 890 million by 2008. Of course, game players and IM devices like Zipit also make the Net mobile for kids.

P2P: Fueling broadband growth everywhere

First we were breathless watching the phenomenal growth of the Web itself (see my lead item back in 10/00). Then it was the number of people going online. Now the breathtaking stats are about broadband adoption (fast connections in homes). And guess what's fueling its high-speed growth? File-sharing, Wired News reports. Because of it, "demand for bandwidth grew 42% in 2004." I was amazed to discover recently that P2P traffic "significantly outweighs Web traffic," according to UK-based CacheLogic, which tracks Internet traffic worldwide. That's right: More people use the Net for file-sharing than for surfing the Web. And P2P "is continuing to grow," CacheLogic adds. Lately, the interest has shifted from music to video, Wired News reports. "Efforts by the film and recording industries to crack down on illegal trading of copyright works haven't resulted in a drop in traffic volumes." For an amazing, at-a-glance shot of what Net traffic looks like, see this slide from a CacheLogic presentation. It represents '04 Net-traffic data compiled from the largest ISPs in Europe, the US, Latin America, and East Asia (the little red stripe is Web traffic, dwarfed by the big, fat gray, fuscia, and turquoise stripes for file-sharing). One begins to see what the media companies are up against and wonder how much even 10,000 lawsuits can really stem the tide.

Flak for Grouper file-sharing

Grouper was thought to be a safe, legal alternative to P2P, but BMG Music thinks not, the Los Angeles Times reports. BMG says it doesn't see the difference between millions sharing files via, say, Kazaa, and a closed group of 30 people (Grouper's group limit) sharing files among each other. Grouper's creators say that group size isn't the only distinguishing factor; files are streamed, or played across the Net, not downloaded from friends' PCs. The LA Times cites copyright experts as saying there's no clear answer as to what's legal, here. Grouper is one of a number of services that represent a trend in online media-sharing predicted by Net pundit and New York University prof. Clay Shirky: sharing across small *private* networks. In an email, Clay also cited as examples Groovenetworks (recently acquired by Microsoft), BadBlue.com, and Waste (I can't find a site, but it was described back in '03 by CNET and CNN).

Get the new patches!

Microsoft just released eight new security patches for Windows computers, five of them critical, VNUNET reports. The critical ones help keep malicious hackers from taking control of our PCs. To make sure you have them (some Windows XP systems are set to download patches automatically), go to Windows Update, where Microsoft will scan your system for patch needs, tell you what it needs, and let you download patches.

More P2P 'pirates' to walk plank

The litigation part of the music industry's anti-file-sharing fight hasn't let up. This time, the RIAA is focusing on university students who have been using the next-generation, high-speed Internet2 research network to do their media-sharing, CNET reports (via Internet2, full-length movies can be downloaded in a few minutes). The Web site enabling P2P at that level is i2Hub.com, which was thought to be a safe haven for P2P. Students at 18 universities will receive notice tomorrow. According to the Washington Post, the MPAA (film industry association) plans to go after file-sharers on Internet2 as well, and the RIAA has now passed the 10,000 lawsuits mark. For some students' views on all this, see the Washington Post's Random Access column. Across the oceans, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in London, announced that it would be suing 963 file-sharers in Japan, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Iceland, Reuters reports, among them its first lawsuits in Asia. For a musician's pro-P2P perspective, see "Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn" at the New York Times.

Microsoft helps cops catch predators

Canadian police and Microsoft have just increased the odds against online pedophiles. They've launched the "Child Exploitation Tracking System," a secure database housed at Ottawa's National Child Exploitation Coordination Center and "designed to help officers link and share huge amounts of information," the Associated Press reports. The database "contains information gathered from international sources as well as from investigating Canadian officers, allowing investigators to plug in an email address, credit-card number or even an Internet alias and see what related information may be known," the AP adds. The so far $3.7 million project is "a bit of a miracle," its originator said. It all started with a January '03 email to Bill Gates from Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police sex-crimes unit, "asking for help in battling child pornography."

Parental controls on Apple's 'Tiger'

Parents will be able to tame the "Tiger" operating system. To be "unleashed" April 29, Apple's Tiger (OS X Version 10.4) will have significant parental controls for email, Web browsing, chat/instant-messaging, etc., and what software can be downloaded from the Web. This is news in our biz: an OS with parental controls bundled in. Parents will be able to give each family member his/her own account on the Mac, each account having "its own file storage location and personal settings," Apple says. "So when you log in with your password, you'll see your Desktop picture and you'll have access to your documents, pictures, bookmarks," software, etc., apparently right where you left off in your last session on the computer. Parents will be able to enable/disable CD or DVD burning; block IMs or emails from people not on a child's buddy list; limit a small child's surfing only to sites the parents bookmark; monitor and record a child's online activities; and decide which software applications kids can use. "A T-rated video game such as 'World of Warcraft' may be great for your teenage daughter, but you may not want your six-year-old to play along," says Apple about that last feature. Privacy is upgraded too: Under "Surf Securely" on this page, Apple says that by "using Safari's new Private Browsing feature, no information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you enter, or pages you visit are saved or cached." Here's early coverage from MacWorld and Techworld UK, but they don't say much about parental controls beyond Safari's child-bookmarks feature, which is really more for little kids because it'd be absurd to try bookmarking all the sites a teenager would need to visit even for a single school project or product research session.

Misleading Web sites: The upside

The Web is a tricky place for uncritical thinkers to gather information. But it can also be a wonderful tool for developing critical thinking. TechLearning.com ran a helpful article recently showing how parents, teachers, and children can use that learning tool. A good example the piece points out is MartinLutherKing.org, run by a white supremacist group. "What better way for a hate group to get out their message than to disguise their agenda and masquerade their hate in a well designed, albeit historically inaccurate, Web site?" writer Frank Westcott asks. He offers tips and things to look out for in critical surfing, such as tildes (~) in URLs, checking whois to find out who's behind a site, and Google's links-to feature (showing all the hate groups that link to MartinLutherKing.org). For more on this subject, see "Critical thinking: Kids' best tool for research."

You don't want this 'patch'!

Tell your kids *not* to download this "patch"! Malicious hackers are sending around an email that looks like it's from Microsoft Windows Update and that tells people to click on a link to what appears to be a Microsoft security-update page, ZDNET reports. The page is a fake, and if they click on the "patch" in it, they'll download a trojan virus that takes control of your PC. The email's subject looks like "Update your windows machine," "Urgent Windows Update," or "Important Windows Update," the San Jose Mercury News reports. What's extra tricky about this email is that it's circulating at the same time Microsoft does its monthly security update. Microsoft doesn't notify us about security patches via email. Everyone in your family should know to go only to the Windows Update page to see if a patch is needed (using the Internet Explorer browser - the page's system scanner doesn't work in Firefox). Here's the real Microsoft security notification page.

Tips from a tech-savvy dad

Eleven-year-old "Rachel" "is a horse freak," her dad told me, "her true passion is horses." In a recent phone interview, "Tom," a tech company executive in California, told me about two less-well-known developments that he and Rachel have encountered and that other parents might want to know about. The first involved a virtual horse-care and -show site Rachel loves, the second involved what Tom called "cross-over sites" that hook kids into online porn. For more, please click to this week's SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter.

Childnet Academy '05

Spending a few days with a small group of people representing seven continents is extraordinary in itself. But when they're young and communicators and promoters of the best of causes and ideas, spending time with each other can be life-changing for them and everyone involved. I'm speaking of this year's Childnet Academy in Jamaica last week, celebrating some of the best young Webmasters in the world. I was inspired by the work of this year's winners, among them:

* UK 8-year-old Lalit Maganti's "Animals in Danger," which Lalit learned how to build from borrowing a Web site how-to book from the library.
* 14-year-old Elizabeth Clegg's "Looking at You" for the sight-impaired (Elizabeth wrote site content from her own experience).
* 17-year-old Nigerian Samuel Oloyede Odofin's - "Biotechnology: The food solution," written in three languages (from a country greatly in need of increased food production).
* "It's all in the mix" by students at Northern Ireland's first religiously integrated school, reaching out with their stories about mixing it up in a divided community to peers in other divided communities worldwide.

PSP connects your kid

With a simple little hack (that's easy for any kid), a child can use his PlayStation Portable to access any page on the Web, USATODAY reports. No hardware modification or unlicensed software installation required,USATODAY even lists the easy steps. The article also tells how to upload your own movies to the device, read e-books, and set up Internet relay chat. The PSP also has parental controls, so if you buy one for your child, configure these with him or her right out of the box, working out some connection ground rules in the process. Remember, when they're playing games over the Net, they're playing them with strangers. The vast majority will be well-meaning gamers just like your child, but some may not be.

Kid-friendly search engines

I've been waiting for this: the specialists at SearchEngineWatch updating their survey of child-safe search engines. The article covers major directories of child-appropriate Web sites, grownup search engines that provide filtering, and a bit about filtering software in general. One children's directory they missed is Kidsnet's Hazoo.com, which offers only child=safe Web pages actually reviewed by human beings (Kidsnet's number was 175 million pages a year ago). For more on Kidsnet filtering, see my write-up, 4/9/04. Parents, you do know about filtered Web search, right? If you don't have filtering for your family PC, this would be the most basic precaution against kids stumbling upon online porn: Go to Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, etc. and turn on strict filtering on their preferences pages. A family rule to use only those filtered search engines (to keep it simple at our house, we all just use one search engine) and not to change the preferences would back that up. As an additional precaution, we tell our kids to use that search engine to find sites whose URLs they're not sure about - don't just type any old URL into your browser windeow, because of the bad stuff you can run into. [Thanks to Marylaine Block's "Neat New Stuff I Found This Week" for pointing out the SearchEngineWatch update.]

'Playlist anxiety'

Don't ya love it - an anthopological study of people's feelings about their iPod playlists? That's what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center did, and - though it was about playlist-sharing at the office - it definitely provides insights into the online music scene in which teens are a huge demographic group. "Public embarrassment may now be the routine lot of the unhappy [teenager] who gets caught with a [music] collection too heavily weighted toward the collective works of [fill in any band or singer that is "uncool" among his/her peer group]," CNET reports. Other findings: people waiting to add tunes to their collections until after they'd checked out what other people were listening to; perceptions of others generally unchanged "except for one or two people who seemed a little too attached to the most current pop hits [in which case the perception would be quite negative]"; and "a sense of loss" when friends' computers went offline because people become attached to peers' music libraries. You begin to see who emerges as alpha male and female of these digital-music social packs!

Predator stopped in Seattle

Police arrested a 42-year-old man outside a shopping mall when he was rendezvousing with "a 13-year-old girl" he'd been "grooming" in online chat. "The receptive young girl never existed; detectives had posed as her online, trading sexually explicit banter with the suspect as part of a ruse to catch Internet pedophiles, The Olympian reports. Tech-savvy policework like this is happening more and more worldwide, and if I linked to all the coverage, this news service would just be about that. So I'm linking to this short, clear-cut article in case it's a useful discussion point for family discussions on chatting with strangers online. In many of these stories, 13-14 is the age level particularly vulnerable. This story points to several tactics of predators, including their perusing and using young people's online profiles in blogs, IM, chat, etc. (so kids need to be careful about what they reveal in them). Police also noted two approaches these people take: quick, predatory attempts to meet kids offline and patient "grooming," or relationship-building using various communication modes - chat, email, IM, phone, etc. - over weeks and sometimes months so targeted kids don't feel they're talking to strangers. (Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this piece out.)

Mobile Net, mobile porn

Everything that our children can be exposed to on the Web will soon be on cell phones. A lot already is. CNET columnist Molly Wood does a great job of laying out the not-so-pretty mobile-phone picture today. What "bigger screens, higher resolution, more colors, and video capability" mean in this context, that mobile porn will be a $5 billion industry by 2010, and that the US market for this content is only playing catch-up to what's happening in Europe, Asia, and South America. Some countermeasures are in the works - see "Filtering phones."

Your house: Bird's-eye view at Google

With satellite images, Google is now making it possible for Web searchers to see at a glance how close the hotel they're thinking of booking is to the beach, the Associated Press reports. Great. But there's a flipside to that convenience: Searchers can also type in someone's address and quickly size up the neighborhood layout. Google's new feature , stemming from its purchase of digital mapmaker Keyhole Corp. six months ago, "will enable its users to zoom in on homes and businesses using satellite images... providing a bird's-eye-view of about half the United States." The Keyhole technology provides "close-up perspective of specific addresses." A Keyhole manager told the AP that there is little reason for paranoia about the satellite images, though, because they're 6-12 months old.

Animal hunting as a video game?

California is considering a law to ban what one state legislator calls "video target practice using live animals," the Associated Press reports. People in the state actually run "computer-assisted hunting sites." "It's a response to a Texas ranch that says it is setting up a system that would allow people to shoot at live game via the Internet," according to the AP. State Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach) called it "pay-per-view video game using live animals for target practice." Pro-hunting groups themselves are calling it unethical and unsporting. We can only hope that young Web surfers and gamers haven't found or used such "services," thinking they were legitimate or "just a game."

So what is phishing again?!

I've covered the phishing phenom in the past, but according to the BBC there are still a *lot* of questions out there about just what it is, exactly. Simply put, it's online fraud - people trying to separate you from your personal financial information, passwords, etc. And phishers are getting more sophisticated, CNET reports, with trickier technology (making the phony Web sites their emails link you to look very much like the real thing) and better "social engineering" (being trickier or more persuasive in getting you to do what they want). It's not just about sending you to what appears to be your bank's Web site anymore. It may be a persuasive IM to your child that appears to be from one of their friends and tells them to download this cool photo or that awesome song or click to this online body-rating site. [This page at CNET has a helpful sidebar, "Many types of phishers in the sea."] Phishing requires increasing alertness on the part of both parents and kids - ideally a family discussion about careful downloading and clicking. There are also tech tools to help, for example FraudEliminator (see my 12/17/04 issue), and Internet service providers are increasingly providing tools to protect their customers.

From blogging to 'vlogging'

Teenagers will probably be interested in trying this: video blogging, or "vlogging" - what Google just announced it's going to start hosting. Vlogging "is still a new phenomenon but is expected to take off as Web space becomes cheaper - or even free - and digital cameras become ever more sophisticated," the BBC reports. Teen bloggers, who love playing around with various media, undoubtedly will have fun with this. But there's a downside they and grownups need to be aware of, the same one found in moblogs (blogging with mobile phones), podcasting (blogging with Web and iPod), and regular blogs: the unwise way teens represent themselves with images and video, thinking it's all just among friends (for an extreme, not a common, example, see "Self-published child porn"). Back to the BBC: "The move to let people upload video to Google's servers comes as the firm trials a video search service.... Google's interest in blogging - web logging - stems back to 2003 when it bought popular blog site, Blogger.com."

Trouble for Net cigarette sales

This is timely for the Tobacco-Free Kids Campaign's 10th-annual "Kick Butts Day," April 13: "Two weeks after credit card companies announced they would no longer accept payment for tobacco products bought online, scores of Internet cigarette merchants have effectively lost the means to do business profitably," the New York Times reports. They are "either limping along or have shut down their operations altogether." Kick Butts Day is when "thousands of young people are expected to speak out against tobacco use," according to ConnectforKids.org's latest newsletter. "The initiative empowers young people to become leaders in stopping tobacco use." Connect for Kids cites figures from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids showing that "more than 2,000 children and teens become addicted to tobacco every *day*, one-third of whom will die prematurely." The Times cites the 2004 online cigarette sales figure to have been $1 billion. The US federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says online merchants "had not done enough to comply with age verification practices," among other requirements, according to the Times.

Tell IM-ers about new worm!

Watch out, parents of IM-ers, a nasty email-carried worm that started going around on April Fool's Day is now pestering MSN Messenger users. Posing as Microsoft, Trend Micro, and Symantec, the Chod.B worm "sends out messages to contacts from the infected user's address book, warning them that they are about to receive a file," CNET reports. "The virus then sends a file designed to infect the recipient's system." Tell your kids it looks like it's coming from someone on their buddy list and "sounds" like a friend, saying, "'Check out what I just found on the Internet." The cardinal IM rule they need to have memorized is not to click on *any* file sent them, even from a "buddy" before starting a new, *separate* conversation with that buddy, or screenname, and asking him or her if s/he sent that file. (The worm grabs screennames from people's address books on PCs it has infected in order to pose as buddies.) Also tell them to be wary of clicking on links friends tell them to go to. For more, see the CNET piece. Another little nasty is the fake BlueMountain e-greeting going around, disguising a virus. How to tell? BlueMountain told the Washington Post that "unlike authentic BlueMountain greeting card invites, which come from the email address of the person sending the greeting, the scam messages use a spoofed BlueMountain email address." As for the big picture, ZDNET reports that the quantity of IM threats like these to PC security "increased 250% in the first quarter of 2005."

Copyright law & our kids

Our children - whether they're listeners, downloaders, composers, or digital-music mashers - are affected by the copyright-law decisions being made these days, including the one the US Supreme Court is expected to announce in June. "When people are willing to line up for nearly 24 hours to hear a copyright case, something far bigger than accessing free music is taking place," writes Internet law specialist Michael Geist in the Toronto Star. "That something is a dramatic shift in the production and distribution of creative work by millions of individuals who are both creators and users and now see copyright reform as relevant to them. The success of future reform depends upon recognizing this evolution and ensuring that reform processes properly accommodate the largely unrepresented constituency." Children, parents, educators, artists, entertainment companies, tech innovators - everyone who works with intellectual property, which is basically all of humanity - has a stake in this debate. And it's wonderful fuel for family discussion and helping our children develop critical thinking and moral reasoning. See also the Christian Science Monitor on this and "Bigger picture on file-sharing," 1/30/04. Thanks to Michael Geist for zooming in on its importance.

Anytime, anywhere connecting for kids!

That's what you call the "mobile Internet," and it's one explanation for the *other* digital divide - the one between grownups and kids. It's the "fixed Internet" (having a connected desktop PC wired to a wall somewhere) that we're used to and to which our household rules and so much online-safety research to date apply. The mobile Internet is enabled by the "wi-fi hot spots" proliferating throughout the world - places where anyone can connect wirelessly with anything from a cellphone to a game player to a "walkie talkie"). What 24x7 connecting capability means to families is less and less parental control over young people's access. This puts the onus on all of us - parents and kids - to work harder at developing the most effective filter there will ever be: the one that lies between children's ears, as my colleague Larry Magid of SafeKids.com first put it in an online-safety seminar years ago. Their own critical thinking and media literacy will be children's best protection, along with engaged parenting. The Digital Age calls for a solid parent-child partnership: They can help us with their tech literacy and we can help them with our life literacy, and that's a tremendous opportunity for parent-child communication and mutual respect. For more detail on what the mobile Internet looks like, see DailyBulletin.com.

P2P & new copyright thinking

Hip-hop is a great example of music that's *so* Digital Age, the Christian Science Monitor points out in a thorough think piece on all Net-based music's shades of gray. "The Internet hasn't only made copying easy, it also has helped foster a culture in which some artists create new work by literally reusing or remixing the work of others. Hip-hop music, built on the idea of 'sampling' the beats or sounds of earlier music, is the most obvious of several examples," the Monitor reports. It creatively pulls together "found [musical] objects of other cultural products," it quotes one expert as saying. Which seems to require a new approach to copyright - the reason why there's so much controversy and litigation over traditional copyright models. Some companies are finding some middle ground, for example, Magnatune.com. That was John Buckman's idea in 2003 when he founded Magnatune.com - "an independent record label that sells music through online downloads and CDs and also licenses music for both commercial and noncommercial use," according to the monitor. Its business plan: "Let people listen to the music all they want for free over the Internet. If they like an album so much they want to own it, they can pay a range of prices from $5 to $18 per album, which they can choose." Most customers pay $8.20/album on average. Half goes to the musician (much more than conventional record labels pay.

Hotline help for UK parents

Yesterday I was at a Childnet International conference in Jamaica, during which a dad from the UK asked if there was anyone a parent could call in his country to get help if a child was at risk online - local police didn't seem to be able to help. Though the answer was pretty much "no" yesterday, a BBC report today indicates that it'll be "yes" within a year. "A unit to protect children in the UK from Internet paedophiles is being set up by the Home Office," according to the BBC. To be called the Centre for Child Protection on the Internet, its staff of about 100 people from law enforcement and child welfare will be open 24 hours a day. "The centre will take on work being done by the National Crime Squad and will target those who distribute child porn images or 'groom' children for abuse. It sound as if it will function similarly to Cybertipline.com at the US's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Cybertip.ca in Canada - remarkable services I hope parents in all countries will have access to someday.