Soda pop & free Xboxes

If your child has an unusual thirst for Mountain Dew all of a sudden, it's not necessarily due to its superlative taste. "Pepsi will give away as many as 9,222 Xbox 360 game consoles in a bid to whet appetites for its drinks and the first new version of the Microsoft gadget in five years," CNET reports. Gamers will be able to enter special codes found under the caps of Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and Sierra Mist bottles, into an online account at Yahoo.com, the article says. To enter, players must enter a unique code printed under caps of Mountain Dew, Pepsi and Sierra Mist bottles into an online account at Yahoo.com. Winners will get their Xbox 360s before they go on store shelves (probably before the holidays). Part of the 360's appeal is that it'll be able to access the Web (oh great, some parents will sigh), "allowing players to purchase and download game trailers, new game levels, weapons and vehicles for their games online. The machine also features a wireless controller and a 20GB hard drive for storing games and music."

Anti-piracy in Windows

It's a ways off, but Microsoft's next version of Windows will have strong anti-video piracy safeguards, CNET reports. See the article for details, but "PCs won't be the only ones with reinforced pirate-proofing. Other new consumer electronics devices will have to play by a similar set of rules in order to play back the studios' most valuable content," CNET paraphrases Microsoft as saying. The reason CNET cites? "Microsoft believes it has to make nice with the entertainment industry if the PC is going to form the center of new digital home networks, which could allow such new features as streaming high-definition movies around the home." So it may be that, by late 2006 - when "Vista," the next version of the Windows operating system is expected to ship on new PCs - the era of media companies suing file-sharers will be over. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last week filed lawsuits against 286 US file-sharers "for the first time using peer-to-peer companies' [P2P sites shut down earlier in the year] own data to track down individuals accused of trading movies online," CNET reports. "Most of those sites were hubs connecting people using the BitTorrent technology." The Los Angeles Times editorializes that, "as an educational tool, this type of lawsuit leaves something to be desired."

Music videos in cyberspace

If parents are concerned about what kids see in music videos, the Internet has good news and bad news. The bad news, depending on your POV, might be that music videos are accessible 24x7 online. The good news is that they're much more bare-bones and about the music and the artists than all the sexy, peripheral dramatics of those huge-budget videos of the MTV days, USATODAY reports. The good news for music fans is choice and control (what the Internet is increasingly all about for just about any kind of media consumer): They don't have to wait 'n' see what a broadcaster will dish up for them. They can find just about any video they want, when they want to see/hear it. And the fans themselves - not MTV - are putting bands on the charts these days. Music videos are still No. 2 in popularity, after movie trailers, according to USATODAY, but the numbers it cites point to nothing but growth. AOL Music and MTV Overdrive "maintain thriving video-on-demand vaults online. MSN is building one. Pulling roughly 24 million visitors monthly, Yahoo Music ranks first among digital music sites, and its video component is booming, with users glimpsing more than 350 million clips each month."

Young (alleged) worm writers

You know that IM worm I mentioned last week? An 18- and a 21-year-old were arrested for its dissemination. The teenager, Farid Essebar, was arrested in Morocco and Atilla Ekici was picked up in Turkey, the BBC reports. "They are believed to be responsible for the Zotob worm" that exploited a flaw in Windows 2000 computers, according to the BBC, which added that "more than 100 firms were affected, including CNN and the New York Times." Notable was the speed of the arrests halfway around the world - less than two weeks - which might suggest growing computer-security cooperation between tech companies and law enforcement. CNET has further details.

eDonkey passes up BitTorrent

One thing about file-sharing (tunes, films, games, etc.) has changed and one thing hasn't. What's the same, despite thousands of entertainment-industry lawsuits against file-sharers around the world, is the amount of P2P activity worldwide. What's different, according to UK P2P-traffic-management firm CacheLogic, is that eDonkey is now file-sharers' favorite P2P program, CNET reports. A year ago CacheLogic found that BitTorrent file-sharing accounted for half of all file-sharing activity, and file-sharing accounted for 50-70% of all "data traffic on ISP networks," surpassing even Web use. New No. 1 eDonkey is "a rival with more power to search for content," but with "speedy download features" similar to BitTorrent's. Edonkey "has been translated into local languages in many countries around the world, aiding its spread overseas," CNET adds. The Good Morning Silicon Valley blog points out that lawsuits do seem to cause migration from one P2P technology to another (Gnutella, once considered dead, is back in the running), but do not seem to affect overall file-sharing numbers. See also "File-sharing realities for families."

MySpace: The new MTV

Last week the Wall Street Journal called it a kind of alternate-reality game. This week the New York Times depicts it as a combination virtual bar (with lots of beautiful people and wannabes) and MTV (there will soon be a MySpace record label). Another metaphor relevant to this readership: "Even with many users in their 20's MySpace has the personality of an online version of a teenager's bedroom, a place where the walls are papered with posters and photographs, the music is loud, and grownups are an alien species." The Times also provides fresh (fairly staggering) numbers: about 27 million members, with nearly 400% growth since the start of the year. MySpace passed Google in the number of pages viewed/month, according to comScore MediaMetrix traffic figures the Times cites, and users spend more than three times as much time at MySpace than they do at Facebook.com (here's my latest item on this), according to Nielsen/NetRatings numbers. MySpacers' pictures are a big part of the draw, its founders tell the Times, probably because there's this sense that this is where the musically hip beautiful people gather and network. Remember my item about BeautifulPeople.net? Well, founders Chris DeWolfe (39) and Tom Anderson (29) were brilliant to create that kind of illusion but make it completely open (probably too much so for minors) to all comers and add the blogging element, classifieds like the phenomenally popular Craigslist.com, online invitations as at Evite.com, and "the come-hither dating profiles of Match.com," as the Times puts it. Parents might want to ask any MySpacers at their house to show them what they have in their user profiles and how they've configured the privacy features in their blogs on the site.

A mom writes: Teen solicited in MySpace

Sexual solicitations from strangers are a fact of life for MySpace.com bloggers. Why single out MySpace? Because it's the No. 1 site for teen social blogging (see numbers below), and "if teens are there, predators are there too," said John Shehan of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Exploited Child Unit (the people who run the CyberTipline). There's no research on this yet. But there's strong anecdotal evidence being shared in the law-enforcement community: John said MySpace came up a number of times "as a point of interest" at the internationally recognized Crimes Against Children conference he just attended in Dallas. No other teen-blogging site came up, he told me. "That's not to say this isn't happening at other blogging services, but this is the one I kept hearing about." The reason why I spoke with John is because Karen, a subscriber and parent in California, emailed me that this had come up at her house. She contacted me to give other parents of teen bloggers a heads-up. Please click to my newsletter this week to read her story.

Author-teen interaction

It's a new marketing technique book publishers are testing: "direct cellphone contact" with favorite authors of books for teens. Examples given by USATODAY include The PrincessDiaries series and the The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. "The teen girl audience was chosen to test the program [the latest by HarperCollins] because cellphones are considered their main source of communication. Ads promoting the mobile club are running on teen sites such as thewb.com and begin this week at seventeen.com, cosmogirl.com and ellegirl.com," USATODAY reports. The ads send them to author site MegCabot.com, where they sign up to receive recorded messages from the PrincessDiaries author and up to two text messages from her a week. The venture is part of a growing use of mobile technology in the entertainment industry (to wit earlier items here this week about all types of games coming to mobiles).

Virtual mugging...

…real arrest. A Chinese student in Japan used "bots" to assault and steal virtual objects from characters in the Lineage II fantasy-world game (bots look to unsuspecting gamers like real players but are tougher). He was arrested in Kanagawa Prefecture for selling the stolen virtual objects for real money in an online auction, the BBC reports. The problem is, how to prosecute? There is no virtual-property law yet. The other problem: bots, "a frequent problem in online gaming." Game publishers have "invested heavily in trying to eliminate them," the BBC says, but because they "appear in games in the same way that human players do," they're hard to detect and delete. "Complex techniques called bot traps have to be used to trick bots into revealing themselves" when they're, for example, move a little too fast for "normal" characters. "Asking direct questions or placing players in unusual situations in the game are techniques which are often used by administrators to identify bots. However, for every improvement in bot detection, the bots themselves become more complex and more difficult to spot." Here's an item I ran in June about a dispute over virtual property in China that ended in tragedy.

Have phone, will game

The line between console and handheld games is starting to blur, the Washington Post reports. And that'll be good for family peace, when gamers come in various sizes, from parent to tyke. Because, since just about any type of game will soon be on multiple platforms, including phones, no one will have to fight over the delivery gadget. First, the handheld types are multiplying. "There's Nokia N-Gage, a cell phone designed for playing games. There's Sony's PlayStation Portable, launched last year, which also plays digital music files and movies. In October, a new device called Gizmondo [already out in the UK] will meld all those digital entertainment options and throw in Global Positioning System technology to boot. Even Nintendo is looking for more ways to hit the portable gaming market, with a new Game Boy Micro due out this fall," according to the Post. But the "biggest new frontier" is the phone. "According to research firm IDC, cell phone games took in $345 million worldwide in 2004 and are set to make $590 million in sales this year." On those, gamers will eventually be able to plug into their fantasy-world games because "Cell-Fi" is coming, USATODAY reports. "Over the next few years, companies will start selling dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi phones" ("Wi-Fi" is wireless Internet access). Great. Gamers will be vulnerable to game worms and robots on their cellphones too!

New non-email-bearing worms

Increasingly, instant-messagers and gamers are the victims of worms and viruses. The newest IM worm, which is multilingual and first checks what language a Windows PC is configured to use, attacks MSN Messenger users, CNET reports. IM-ers at your house should know that "when it hits an English system, the worm sends out the following message: 'haha i found your picture!'" When a PC gets infected with it (when the IM-er clicks on the link in the message), it's sent to everyone on the IM-er's buddy list. Clicking on the link downloads "malicious software that installs a backdoor and furthers the spread of the worm." For help, see "Tips from a tech-savvy dad: IM precautions." The new game worm is not widespread but points to a trend, The Register reports. Players of the fantasy role-playing game Priston Tale have had their usernames, passwords, and virtual property stolen by virus writers. Their objective is to steal virtual goods like swords in order to sell them online for real money. Other multiplayer games that have been targeted in this way include Lineage, Outwar and Legend of Mir 2, according to The Register. "Last month a group of people were arrested in South Korea over allegations that they spread password stealing programs in order to steal the resources of online gamers."

Cheap high-speed access

The $14.95/month price tag on the new broadband Internet service just announced by Verizon and Yahoo nothing to shake a fist at. It's not the fastest DSL connection, but it's 10 times faster than dial-up, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Yahoo provides its premium email service (100 MB of storage), PC security software, video service, and "commercial-free Internet radio," the Chronicle reports. Verizon has a presence in 28 states and the District of Columbia, so this service is available to a lot of US residents (Yahoo has a similar arrangement with SBC Communications, which announced $14.95/mo. high-speed service in June.

New: Google IM

Google Talk is being launched today, offering instant-messaging *and* computer-to-computer voice chat, the Associated Press reports. Where teenagers are concerned, it won't be easy for Google to get entire peer groups (or schools) to switch from AIM or MSN Messenger, because it's social groups not individuals that determine what service teens use. But adding a phone-like feature might make it easier for young multitaskers to make the switch. So far Google Talk only works on Windows XP and 2000 PCs, not Macs, but users of Apple's iChat can talk with Google IM-ers, according to Good Morning Silicon Valley, and Google Talk also works with Trillian IM. Here's coverage by CNET and the San Jose Mercury News.

MySpace as 'alternate reality'

Parents of MySpace bloggers consider this: One way to think of the site is as a cross between a videogame and a shopping mall. Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the Internet is becoming one of those immersive, massively multiplayer alternate-reality games, and he uses MySpace.com as an example. Because at MySpace, he writes, "tens of thousands of young people spend many hours a day wandering around as if in a suburban shopping mall, looking for friends, expressing opinions, acquiring trends and, in general, leading a life that at times seems to have more reality to it than the life they lead when they log off." Lee's fairly disinterested take on MySpace is revealing. It's first and foremost a social-networking site, so the participants are "stop the presses - interested in sex and attractive sexual partners," have "exhibitionist tendencies, though in a PG sort of way," rarely read (books, etc.), and mostly like to "chill." The male-to-female ratio "seems three or four to one," which means female participants get a lot of attention. Lee also says "much of MySpace is open for all to see," which means kids aren't paying much attention to protecting their privacy. The site *says* under-16s aren't allowed, but I hear from a lot of parents of under-16s who are blogging at MySpace - e.g., see "A [12-year-old's] dad on kids' blogs" and "Kids: Budding online spin doctors"). Here, too, is a CommonSenseMedia editorial on MySpace, which got 15.5 million unique visitors in May, according to MarketWatch.

Legit 'free' file-sharing

More evidence of innovation in digital media this week. After we heard of an anime distributor actually using BitTorrent file-sharing to promote a new series came the news of a UK-based ISP about to allow its customers to swap music files with each other, legally and at no cost above regular broadband service," The Guardian reports. The "music service provider" is called Playlouder, and it just signed a deal with SonyBMG that allows the use of Kazaa, eDonkey, etc. for sharing tunes within Playlouder's "walled garden." File-sharers won't particularly like the closed-system part, but there is some flexibility: "Because there will be no restrictions on the format in which the traded music is encoded, users will be free to transfer songs to any type of digital music player, including the market leading Apple iPod, or burn them to CD," according to The Guardian. SonyBMG, and other labels expected to follow (Playlouder already had deals with "dozens of independent labels" in the Association of Independent Music), will get a percentage of the Internet service fees. What's clear from this week's news is that there's a growing number of legal options for digital music fans. So far the work of these artists will be available: Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, George Michael, Jamiroquai, Macy Gray, Manic Street Preachers, Oasis, The Clash, Travis, Jennifer Lopez, Elvis Presley, Pink, Will Young, Outkast, Alicia Keys and Dido. Here's the BBC's coverage.

BitTorrent: Not the nemesis?!

For media companies - especially film and TV ones - BitTorrent file-sharing is usually the enemy. This week, a real twist: "ADV Films, the largest distributor of anime in the United States, has decided to make the best of a bad situation," the New York Times reports. "To publicize its new series 'Gilgamesh' and 'Goddanar,' it is releasing promotional packages - not in stores, but via the dreaded BitTorrent." The reason: smart marketing. Giving freebies or extras - "biographical information about the characters, images and statistics of the giant robots, promotional clips and links to online reviews" - to the vast numbers of devoted anime fans to seed interest in new content is just plain efficient. It's much more efficient than conventional media marketing because anime fans share digitally over the Net, and BitTorrent sometimes has more users than the Web itself (see this 2004 graph by Net traffic-measuring firm CacheLogic; BitTorrent is gray, the Web is red). For more on what happened last week, see CNET's "When script kiddies play with fire on the Internet". For a parent's warning on the *darkside* of anime on the Web (certainly not all of it), see my recent feature "A mom writes: Yaoi not for kids!".

Homework helpers

What a concept: free academic guidance on the Web and cellphones. The Associated Press gives examples, such as WebMath.com (hard to tell who's behind it, but this page sheds some light) and retired engineer Henry Fliegler, who "spends about three hours daily answering 25 or so [math] questions." Then there are fee-based services AskMeNow.com (via email and cellphones) and Google Answers. Here's some more free advice from the AP: "Services offered by universities and government agencies may be more reliable than a commercial service with little information about its operators." The Web can also help kids exercise their critical thinking, when they use it to check out who's behind a service and figure out how much they *really* know. For more on this, see "Critical thinking: Kids' best research (and online-safety) tool." For more homework help, check out the links at Net-mom's Nice Sites, IncredibleInternet.com, and Discovery School.

Future job security...

…for computer science students is in becoming a "renaissance geek," the New York Times reports. The Times cites the example of a Virginia Tech PhD student: "Her research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages." All this "spice" doesn't just keep her interested; it's "crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China," according to the Times. But that's not all - more and more students in the liberal arts are needing tech skills. They're finding they often "need to use, design and sometimes write computer programs."

The new 'hacking'

There was a time when the point of hacking for "bright teens" was just to prove that they could indeed hack their way in. Now it seems to be making money, the Christian Science Monitor suggests. Hackers "rent" the networks of computers they've taken over with Trojan viruses to spammers (the networks are shrinking and getting more valuable as people get smarter and protect their PCs). "That's a major reason that turf wars are emerging among hackers. Besides infiltrating computer systems, the viruses are now also designed to kill any other competing viruses in those systems," according to the Monitor, in an article that sheds unusual light on this murky scene. Last week's brief "epidemic" among media organizations (see "PC 'virus season' starts") was short-lived but scary to computer security professionals because of how fast the viruses went out after the vulnerability was discovered.

Web, yes; browser, no?!

Google seems to be telling Net users that they don't really need a browser, or maybe that PCs are getting more like Macs. It's launching "Sidebar" - software that pulls news stories, photographs, weather updates, stock quotes, and other features onto a user's computer without opening a Web browser," the Los Angeles Times reports. Sidebar points to a trend. Its features and the way they work - "trying to shorten the connection between consumers and the content that interests them, as the Times put it - are a bit like the "widgets" in the "Konfabulator platform" that Yahoo just acquired and "Spotlight" and "Dashboard" in Apple's Tiger OS X operating system. At least students can have more fun taking notes on their laptops, typing on digital "stickies." Let's just hope that, in Google and Yahoo's version, advertising won't appear on those stickies. Here's the BBC on Sidebar.

Spotlight: Brazil's child-porn hotline

This week I heard from subscriber, parent, and Internet-security Tito in Portugal. He wanted to highlight the work of Censura.com.br in Brazil, a "National Campaign to Combat Pedophilia on the Internet." The service includes a child-porn hotline, which looks to be Brazil's equivalent to the US's significantly more well-funded (that's a guess) CyberTipline.com at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Cybertip.ca in Canada. For more details from Tito, please click to my newsletter this week. The CyberTipline and Cybertip.ca do, however take and process reports about other forms of online child exploitation as well. Please check out their home pages for the categories.

N.J. teen sentenced for DoS attacks

Computer crimes by teens are being taken seriously. Seventeen-year-old Jasmine Singh was sentenced to five years in youth detention for taking part in a denial-of-service, The Register reports. He apparently was hired to launch the attacks against online sporting goods stores, causing damages of $1.5 million. Judge Frederick DeVesa of New Brunswick, N.J., Superior Court "also ordered Singh to pay $35,000 in compensation. Singh used networks of compromised machines [zombie computers taken over by Trojan viruses]" to take out the Web sites "at the alleged behest of Jason Arabo, 18, of Southfield, Michigan, who ran competing Web sites."

The age of remixes, mash-ups

Maybe we parents start to understand a little of what's behind cut-'n'-paste plagiarism and the link between it and music mash-ups when we read "cyber-punk/sci-fi" author William Gibson's "God's Little Toys" in Wired magazine. Gibson talks about what a revelation it was for him at 13 in 1961 to run across the work of William S. Burroughs, who "incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism." But Gibson called it Burroughs's "interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot" and proceeded to do something like it with his Apple IIc. "Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage."

But I really zoomed in on this in his essay: "Our culture no longer bothers to use words like *appropriation* or *borrowing* [emphasis his] to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, *audience* is as antique a term as *record*, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical…. The remix is the very nature of the digital." A perfect example of this need to participate, to mash stuff up together, was cited by CNET this week: "What do you get if you cross Google Maps with an online gas-price tracker? A shift in the way the Web works," CNET reports, referring to "Cheap Gas." "Now, clever programming tricks that use data from public Web sites are letting developers mix up that information to suit consumers' particular needs.

Impasse on violent games?

At least a temporary stand-off in the latest research on this subject, the Washington Post reports. On one side there's the just-released University of Illinois study finding that "'robust exposure to a highly violent video game' did not prompt players to project violent tendencies into real life," according to the Post. On the other side is the American Psychological Association's statement this week that "exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior, and angry feelings among youth," according to the Associated Press. At least the impasse is good if it keeps the subject in the public's face and gets us parents thinking about things like checking ratings before buying. The Post piece has some good background. Here's more coverage at TheRegister.com in the UK.

iPod insights

Descriptions like "a window to your soul," a little box of "personal emotions and memories," and "a powerful identity technology" are not to be taken lightly. They come from, respectively, a software professional, a graduate student and human rights worker, and a university professor (Sherry Turkle, who directs the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT), quoted in the Washington Post. It's not the only MP3 player, but the iPod is the new "free toaster," according to the New York Times, and 22 million own one, many of whom are playing back parts of their lives along with all those tunes.

N.Y. mom to fight RIAA

Like many parents of file-sharers, I suspect, this one didn't even know what Kazaa was until she was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). But there are a couple of unusual things about the case of Patricia Santangelo, single mother of five between the ages of 6 and 19: 1) She says the name on the lawsuit is a friend of her children's (using Kazaa at her house), and 2) she's actually going to court with this case, reports TheJournalNews.com, a paper in the New York City area. The article offers some good context and raises some interesting legal questions (e.g., a lawyer who has defended about 15 clients in similar lawsuits saying that the record companies' case is weak because they're "suing people who made songs available to others, whether or not there is any proof they ever illegally copied a song," and he claims there's no copyright infringement without copying). Despite the suing of more than 13,000 US file-sharers (or their parents) to date, this is a legal area that hasn't been tested in the courts. The vast majority have settled out of court with the help of the RIAA's settlement center, "which was designed to facilitate Internet users' paying penalties to the record companies before they were sued. Santangelo said the settlement center bullied her, trying to get her to accept a settlement offer" for her to pay $7,500. This case will go to US District Judge Colleen McMahon, who said she "would love to see a mom fighting one of these." See an earlier story about a family in Ohio suing a P2P service for being sued by the RIAA. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this story out.]

Schools & wired students

Schools are in quite the quandary these days, where kid tech's concerned. "As classes resume this month, schools across Texas are struggling to create and enforce technology policies that keep pace with today's children - a generation dependent on cellphones, text messaging and digital music players," the Houston Chronicle reports, and Texas educators are not alone. Some schools ban cellphones and MP3 players outright, others require them to be turned off during school hours, but - since the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and then the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York - schools have needed to strike a balance between potential class disruption and parents' wanting their kids "to have access to cell phones in emergencies," according to the Chronicle. In other school-tech news, the York (Pa.) Daily Record reports on tech as a "cheating tool"; CNET on "classroom clickers," "handheld gadgets, which look and work a lot like TV remote controls, [for responding] to classroom polls and quizzes without ever raising their hands or voices" (helpful to shy students); CNET also reports on how three UK secondary schools are testing the value of computer games in learning; and, on the remedial side, the Washington Post says online tutoring has gone mainstream, with "millions of students logging on to get assistance with reading, writing and arithmetic."

Online child porn a growing problem

Over the past four years, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has seen a 400% increase in reports of child-porn Web sites to its CyberTipline, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "Law-enforcement officials are particularly disturbed by the increased number of commercial sites that offer photos of exploited children in return for a credit-card number," according to the Monitor. So one way law enforcement worldwide is fighting the problem is at the financial "chokepoint" - trying to shut down the use of credit cards in child-porn transactions. Visa International has been helping for two years, Mastercard is reportedly about to jump in. But smaller, illicit credit-card-billing services are another key link in the chain. Police two years ago shut down Regpay, one such company in Minsk, Belarus, with 50 child-porn sites as clients. Those sites had 270,000 subscribers - "4,000 in New Jersey alone," the Monitor says. "Because the membership pool was so large, law-enforcement officials have broken the prosecutions down into two phases. The first phase was to dismantle the financial apparatus…. The second phase, which is ongoing, is to arrest individuals who subscribed to the sites," such as respected members of communities who work with children, the Monitor adds. [Thanks to the NCEMC for pointing this story out. To report child-porn activity, go to CyberTipline.com or call 800.843.5678.]

Parent-child 'tech gap'

Fortunately for kids, tech gadgets from phones to laptops are for safety and productivity as much as communications and entertainment. That makes them a lot easier for parents to buy for their kids. Parents look at how "PCs with broadband connections can be used to research papers on the Internet, write term papers on word processors and run a wide variety of educational software," RedNova.com reports. But parents need to be aware (if they're not already) that a connected computer can be any device a kid wants it to be, including a phone and gameplayer, and they need to know what sort of device it is, when, and if kids actually use it as a productivity tool. The other part of all this that's interesting is that tech gadgets are not just tools to *use*, but also tools of self-expression. Teenagers are just as like to care about what the device looks like - and whether they can customize its look - as about what they can do with it.

PC 'virus season' starts

The headlines are saying things like "Worm wreaking havoc," and GovTech.net dubbed this the start of the PC virus season. But if your family Windows PC has the latest patch , you should be ok (see my alert). [Households with broadband connections should never hesitate, however, to get the latest patch or turn on Microsoft's automated patching, and should always have anti-virus software and a firewall running.] What appears to be happening this week, as Reuters reports, is a kind of gang war in cyberspace. Citing Finnish security firm F-Secure, Reuters says "worms that have brought down systems around the world in recent days are starting to attack each other." One worm gets into an unprotected PC and destroys a rival worm! F-Secure says three "virus-writing gangs" are "competing to build the biggest network of infected machines." Not comforting news, but Reuters also reports that Microsoft and top anti-virus companies Symantec and McAfee said damage to systems had been limited and "was unlikely to cause widespread havoc." Meanwhile, Apple has patched more than 40 critical vulnerabilities in its latest patch, ZDNET UK reports. For more on all this, see "Hackers and crackers out to enslave your machine" in the Sunday Tribune (in South Africa) and my "UK: No. 1 in family 'zombie' PCs."

RIAA shift to CD-burning

Move over file-sharing. The RIAA has decided that CD-burning is now the biggest threat to the recording industry, the Associated Press reports. Copying music to CDs now accounts for "29% of all recorded music obtained by music fans last year," compared to 16% for downloads from file-sharing networks, RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol told the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, citing new figures from market researcher NPD Group. The research also showed that half of all music obtained came from "authorized CD sales" and about 4% from paid music downloads. As a San Jose Mercury News blog put it, "he assumed, as one would expect an RIAA heavy to, that those burned CDs are largely illegitimate. No chance that they're a burn of music purchased via iTunes or a backup copy of a legitimately purchased CD for play in the car, apparently." Brainwol mentioned that copy-protection technology on CDs (also known as digital rights management, or DRM) is the solution to the problem. What he didn't mention was whether the number of lawsuits against file-sharers (another solution the RIAA has taken) would go down. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this news out.]

New spam trend: Appealing to fears

"Spam is taking a nasty turn," ZDNET UK reports, as spammers switch away from porn as a lure to "capitalize on computer users' fears of crime, terrorism, and sexual predators." They send around emails trying to grab us with Subject lines like: 'Protect your child from sex offenders!', says ZDNET UK, citing a report from email security company Clearswift. Of course, faux pharmaceuticals are still a popular topic: "The 'Viagra market' remained high at 40%, while porn-related spam had dropped to its lowest-ever level of 3.6%." ClickzStats has big-picture figures on spam, viruses, and phishing.

Put 'ICE' on kids' phones

Parents, this is a really good idea, especially for kids' cellphones. It was a British paramedic's idea - to have an emergency contact number (listed as "ICE") in every phone's address book or contact list, USATODAY reports. "Accompanying that acronym would be the name and phone numbers of the person who should be called if something has happened to the owner of the phone." Even if a child just loses the phone, the number can be used to get it back to its owner, but we can all see what a great help this would be to anyone trying to help a child for any reason - instant access to the people who care about this child most. The idea is in fact a full-blown campaign in the UK. "The ICE campaign was launched in Britain in April, but people really started paying attention after the July terrorist bombings in London that killed 56 and injured hundreds," according to USATODAY. Paramedics in the US have picked up on the idea and are also now promoting it.

Blogs, Facebook for making friends

If you're the parent of a college-bound person, you do know about TheFacebook, don't you? S/he probably does, because it's about more than social networking. It also eases the transition for growing numbers of incoming university students nationwide. "Before college classes start later this month, thousands of freshmen in South Florida will have moved into their dorms, made friends, joined clubs and planned parties - all without setting foot on campus," the Miami Herald reports. The Herald says more than 10,000 University of Miami students "are registered on Facebook … nearly 8,000 at Florida International University; 1,000 at Nova Southeastern; and hundreds at Lynn and Barry Universities - not to mention the legions of local high school students heading out of state." TheFacebook has around 3 million registered users on their way to nearly nearly 900 campuses nationwide. Read the Herald piece to understand how useful a tool this is for students. Read an article at AZCentral.com (our of Phoenix) to see how high school and college students use blogs and TheFacebook to meet people, and specifically how "Adam Norris, 18," uses his blog to "meet girls." "Norris, a self-described geek with a slight frame … says he has more than 300 'friends' on his MySpace[.com] account, and he has communicated with each of them."

Argentine dads' Net-safety site

Some of the most effective work in kids' online safety is done by parents themselves at a grassroots level, and what's happening in Argentina is no exception. Ricardo Lapadula and Carlos Biscay recently emailed me (thoughtfully in English) about their new public-service site, ChicosenInternet.com.ar - ChildrenontheInternet, also translated as "Secure Internet for Kids."

Games: Not just child's play

The problem is, we've always associated the word "game" with something kids do. Now that there are digital games for kids *and* adults, those of us over 40 who didn't grow up with them are confused, concerned, etc., about the ones for adults, The Economist suggests. "Like rock and roll in the 1950s, games have been accepted by the young and largely rejected by the old. Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium and the debate will have moved on." In fact, the Economist says, games are well on the way to becoming a mainstream medium - half of Americans play videogames, but of course 76% of them are under 40 and the average gamer's age is 30. So, to gamers, games are more and more like movies, both in production values and in variety of content and age-appropriateness. Parents who are gamers know that they need to be as aware of game ratings as they are of film ratings. Gamer parents also know, the article suggests, that even Grand Theft Auto isn't all about violence. "The problem-solving mechanic that underlies most games is like the 90% of an iceberg below the waterline - invisible to non-gamers. But look beneath the violent veneer of Grand Theft Auto, and it is really no different from a swords-and-sorcery game. Instead of stealing a crystal and delivering it to a wizard so that he can cure the princess, say, you may have to intercept a consignment of drugs and deliver it to a gang boss so he can ransom a hostage. It is the pleasure of this problem-solving, not the superficial violence which sometimes accompanies it, that can make gaming such a satisfying experience." The piece cites a study of the effects on players of violent fantasy-world game Asheron's Call 2 (look under the subhead "Moral Choices" in the Economist piece for conclusions). [Thanks to reader and dad Tito in Portugal for pointing this article out.]

GTA patch released

The makers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have released a "No More Hot Coffee" patch for the game, CNET reports. The patch disables access to the sexually explicit content that got so much media attention last month. The patch can be downloaded from NoMoreHotCoffee.com, which includes instructions and a FAQ by GTA creators Rockstar Games. The FAQ says that, after installed, the patch blocks the Hot Coffee mod from being installed. So far, this doesn't change the Entertainment Software Rating Board's "Adults Only" (18+) rating, but - content-wise - it does realign the game with its original "Mature" (17+) rating. Rating descriptions can be found here at the ESRB.

Online predator convicted

There have been many such convictions - this is just a recent example so parents can be on the alert for danger signs. A 32-year-old man in Texas was convicted for criminal solicitation of a minor, the Texas attorney general's office reports. In this case, the minor was a 12-year-old girl in Missouri. She went to her mother distraught because the man, "who has sent her more than 200 sexually explicit emails had attempted to commit suicide," according to the press release. They had been exchanging emails for nearly two months. "During their email communications, the suspect told the child that he loved her and that he was going to kill himself if they could not meet. The child ultimately received an email stating that the suspect was in the hospital, possibly for trying to commit suicide." The mother called the CyberTipline (1-800-843-5678 or CyberTipline.com) at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which immediately contacted the Beaumont, Texas, police. The investigation led to the man's arrest in February and conviction in June. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to three years in prison. Very few cases like this involve children over 15, according to research at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (see "Net-related crimes against children: Reality check"). On police work in this area, see "Pedophiles better at using Internet to prey on kids" from the Associated Press and "I was groomed online" at the BBC.

Gamer convicted

A 20-year-old in Alabama "whose lawyers claimed the video game Grand Theft Auto and childhood abuse caused him to kill three small-town police officers" was convicted for capital murder Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The AP added that the jury deliberated for "just over an hour."

Korean dies in marathon game session

It was reported worldwide: A 28-year-old man died at a cybercafe in Taegu, southern Korea, after some 50 straight hours playing Starcraft, the BBC reports. The cause of death, police said, was presumed to be heart failure stemming from exhaustion. "The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session," the BBC added, citing police reports. "Online gaming in South Korea is extremely popular…. Games are televised and professional players are treated, as well as paid, like sports stars. Professional gamers there attract huge sums in sponsorship and can make more than $100,000 a year." Here's The Economist on how the worldwide debate on the impact of gaming is intensifying. And here are links in Google to multiple reports on the tragedy in Korea.

Student hacks criminal?

They're being called the "Dirty Baker's Dozen" in the UK and "the Kutztown 13" in the US, and their story has been picked up by more than 100 media outlets in the US, the UK, Canada, and China. "The trouble began last fall after the district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the [Kutztown, Pa.] high school about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia," the Associated Press reports. The Register in the UK continues the story with tongue in cheek: "The administrators had not … reckoned on the sheer determination and Machiavellian cunning of the students. They quickly found the admin password allowing unrestricted internet access - not by a keystroke logging black op or extracting it from the IT manager at the point of a gun - but rather because it was taped to the back of every machine." The students downloaded iChat and proceeded to chat. "At least one student viewed pornography. Some students also turned off the remote [student-]monitoring function … using it to view administrators' own computer screens." The students have been charged with computer trespass, a felony in Pennsylvania, and a hearing in juvenile court has been set for August 24. Possible sanctions they face include juvenile detention, probation, and community service. An uncle of one of the boys set up CutUsABreak.org with their side of the story. The site, which reportedly has received tens of thousands of visitors, asks of school administrators: "Make it policy that there is a back up plan other than felony charges for the kids who can not handle the temptations that laptops bring into their lives."

6 patches, 3 critical: Git 'em!

If your family computer is a Windows one, be sure to get the new patches Microsoft has just released (if you haven't turned on automatic updates here). Microsoft says three of them are critical to your PC's security. They include a patch bundle for the Internet Explorer browser, and you need it even if you've switched to Firefox, Washington Post security expert Brian Krebs points out. See my patch alert last month for links to further info.

Digital music-scene primer

There are so many ins and outs to digital music - the costs, pluses, and minuses of playing, renting, and owning - that few kids, much less parents, can keep up with it all. So the New York Times's David Pogue has provided quite a service in walking us through a bunch of them. For example, if you rent/subscribe and want to move tunes to your MP3 player, note that you need to connect it to "the mother ship" service once a month so those songs don't self-destruct; Yahoo Music lets subscribers swap tunes via Instant Messenger; Wal-Mart has a limited library, but it will press a custom CD for you; and you can only listen (not burn) Rhapsody's free 25 songs a month, but they'll give you a good feel for what's happening on the pop scene. Check it out, and you may be able to help music fans at your house stretch their music budgets. While we're on the subject, a fascinating development in Japan following iTunes's debut there (where, in just four days, people downloaded 1 million songs): Musicians there are defying their record labels and trying to get their songs into iTunes, the Associated Press reports. Sony Music has not yet signed up to join Apple's service, the AP added.

'Second Life' for teens

Now there's a version for 13-to-17-year-olds, CNET reports in "'Second Life' for teens: 3D fun sans the brothels." Second Life is an MMORPG. Catchy acronym, huh? It stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and this one's true to its description, with more than 40,000 subscribers (logging an average of 20 hours/week) who together create this virtual world. "A lot of Second Lifers are making money selling [virtual] things that they've created in the game," the San Jose Mercury News game blog reports. But it can get sexually explicit, so creators Linden Lab has just opened Teen.SecondLife.com, where teenagers can "build the world the way they want it" and where "only authorized adults" are allowed, according to the game's page for parents. No brothels, no "metrosexual goblins." The forums are monitored and Linden Lab staff are always available to players via IM, the site says. However, parents may want to note that on its Terms of Service page, the company says it "cannot absolutely control whether minors gain access to the Service other than the Teen Grid … and makes no representation that users inside the Teen Grid [game] are not adults. Linden cannot ensure that other users will not provide … access to Content that parents … may find inappropriate…." For insights into all the communications tools associated with many online games, see this page. Here's an earlier CNET big-picture piece on virtual worlds. Play requires a one-time fee of $10, but it's about $10 a month to be able to "own land" in this world.

New IM worm

Parents of instant-messagers need to be aware that IM and file-sharing are definitely vulnerable points for the family PC. "In June, technicians at the [Akonix] IM security [firm] registered a 400% increase in threats targeting instant messaging and P2P networks," Internet News reports. Last month was better, they said, but there's a new IM worm circulating. Called Chode-D, the spyware-installing worm was deemed "medium risk" by Akonix. It "runs continuously in the background of computers," allowing a "remote intruder" to, among other things, send emails, download software, participate in denial-of-service attacks, steal passwords, and disable anti-virus products. Consumer Reports has a really basic article (with pictures), "How to Outsmart Computer Viruses," but it doesn't mention IM. Worms and viruses come via IM similarly, but suggesting to the receiver (sometimes posing as a friend) that s/he click on a link or attachment, and - if they think a friend is sending them something - kids can be pretty receptive. Please see "Tips from a tech-savvy dad: IM precautions" for help on the IM front.

A teachable blog

Instead of a teachable moment, how about classroom blogs as *ongoing* instructional opportunities? Some smart teachers have established blogs (easy-to-update Web sites) to do a number of things: keep parents up on classroom activities, develop students' summarizing and writing skills, and teach kids safe, constructive blogging. An example is the class blog of 5th-grade teacher Mr. Roemer in the St. Petersburg, Fla., area, "among a smattering nationwide," the St. Petersburg Times reports. Mr. Roemer has students post daily entries about what they did in class that day, and he checks it at night, answering questions they or their parents might have about homework right in the blog. Blogging's as easy a technology as word-processing, so it's not the tech that's challenging here, it's the time Mr. Roemer puts in. But at least he's spending it on communicating rather than on the tech enables it.

GameSpot's new subscription service

For gamers, it's sort of like an ever-available, create-your-own LAN party or one of those strip-mall game centers in your own home, and it's an interesting development for gamers' parents to know about. GameSpot, a Web site owned by CNET that's visited by some 20 million gamers a month, has started a $9.99-a-month subscription service that allows them to play "at the highest speed connections in online games such as Electronic Arts's Battlefield 2," the San Jose Mercury News reports (Battlefield 2 is rated 13+ for violence). "It remains to be seen if gamers will pay to play online games that they can play for free via the Internet," the Merc adds, but GameSpot folk say it "removes a lot of the hassles from online gaming." Gamers can host their own games, e.g., customize a Battlefield 2 game "to their tastes so that as many as 64 players can fight it out without annoying hiccups in broadband service that slow down a game." They'll be able to tap into "computing power" GameSpot has leased and data centers on both US coasts for a better gaming experience.

Parents may want to be aware that the service also offers discussion groups, voice chat services, and tournaments, which means communicating with strangers, but this is more for teenagers and experienced gamers focused on the game, so probably less risky than Web-based chat in general. However, an anonymous poster to my blog who says s/he's an adult player of online games, wrote, "Then of course there's the chat system built into every game, which is constantly working to pass on all sorts of abuse … sexually as well as aggressively." Ask any gamers you know how much they use those community tools, how bad the griefing is, and - beyond griefing - whether people use chat to talk about anything but the game at hand. I'd appreciate hearing their answers - via anne@netfamilynews.org.

'Camp' for aspiring game designers

"Yes, dear parents, the countless hours spent glued to the screen don't necessarily mean wasted time for your children," reports the Washington Post in an article about summer camp that isn't the just-ended, five-week Urban Video Game Academy at McKinley Technology High School in the Washington, D.C., area. "The academy, like video game summer camps at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches the ins and outs of game design, exposing the joystick generation to the possibility of careers in the multibillion-dollar industry [7.3 billion last year]." At McKinley this past month, there were about 25 design trainees, all 9th- and 10th-graders, about a third girls, most African American, the rest Latinos. This diversity is important, the article points out. "If video games represent the next evolution of storytelling, as hard-core gamers and industry insiders insist they do, then who are the storytellers and what kind of stories get to be told?" A lack of diversity "results in here-we-go-again stereotypical story lines," those gaming insiders say. The picture is not pretty at the moment. Industry demographics cited in the Post indicate that it's 80.5% white, 2.5% black, 3.5% Latino and 8.5% Asian, and seven out of eight people in the industry are male. "These racial proportions aren't hugely different from the demographics of game players, according to Nielsen Entertainment's Interactive Group, except in the coveted 18-to-24 male demographic. There, 17 percent are black and 18 percent are Latino.

For 'beautiful people' only

Heard of BeautifulPeople.net? Teenagers you know probably have. It's a cross between HotorNot.com (people rating) and Friendster.com (social networking) or maybe Match.com (online dating). As USATODAY puts it, it's "the electronic equivalent of the junior high cafeteria, with the popular kids - i.e., members - voting on whether to offer seats to the hopeful hordes." As the site itself describes the process, "Once you have uploaded your profile, you will be rated by existing members of the opposite sex over a three day period. They will judge whether your picture and profile are deemed attractive enough to grant you coveted access." What a marketing ploy! According to USATODAY, the service started in Denmark, moved on to the UK, and has just launched in the US. To look into this scene a little further, there's RateMe.com, RateMyBody.com, and RatingSpot.com; or just look up "rating sites" in a search engine.

Kids 'n' phones

The good news is they have parental controls, the bad news is they're not easy to program. USATODAY's Ed Baig looks at Firefly and TicTalk, cellphones targeting tweens (9-to-12-year-olds) but maybe best for the lower end of that spectrum. Control is more about who kids can call than the amount of talking, but TicTalk can be programmed to limit time spent talking with people at specific phone numbers. Check out the article for further detail.

Then there are the big kids - the ones leaving for distant schools in the fall. Net phoning, or VoIP (for voice-over Internet protocol), would certainly be the cheapest way to go, but before you go that route, read "Talk is Cheap, But Not That Cheap" on the realities of VoIP in the New York Times. If you're thinking cellular's the way to go, check out "Tough Course: The Calculus of Cellphones." Writer David Pogue is such a card: "When your child heads off to college for the first time, be prepared for some intense emotional displays: prolonged farewell speeches, physical clinging, hysterical weeping. Your child may show some emotion, too." But he gets serious and wades through the complexities of picking a plan, saying at least there are more family-plan options now.

A mom writes: Yaoi not for kids!

Like so many kids, when she was 12, Susanna (her mother asked me not to use her real name or current age) wanted to design and build her own Web site about her No. 1 interest in life: in Susanna's case, YuYu Hakusho. Her mother thought that was fine, until she found out what Susanna's research into Web-based anime and manga led her to: the X-rated subset of anime fan-art and fan-fiction online. It adds a new dimension to the chanslash phenomenon another mom emailed me about last spring, because yaoi is images as well as text (images are tougher to filter). For the complete story, please click to my feature this week.

Streaming: Legal listening online

Here's a new-old approach, at least for digital music fans who spend a lot of time at their computers for school or work. I say "new-old" because music streaming over the Web has been around for quite a while, but now it's really taking off, according to Slate. Why? It's free and it's legal. Entire albums are being streamed by record labels because they're finally getting it that piracy isn't really an issue with streaming - people will sample, enjoy, then go buy the CD. But Slate has some "tips for beginners" like "don't pony up for a subscription site … paying for streams is for suckers … [and] Google is a good first stop. Try typing in 'full album streaming'." Check out the piece for more tips. Meanwhile, file-sharing is not dead after the Supreme Court's decision against Grokster, it's just going underground. The New York Times describes the "darknet" - for anonymous file-sharing - that's been in the works. Today Agence France Press reported that "a test version … has been made available for download at the Freenet Web site, Ian Clarke of the project said." In other P2P news, the San Jose Mercury News reports on BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen's plans to commercialize the technology; TheLocal in Sweden reports that Internet service providers in that country say Sweden's month-old law banning file-sharing has had "no effect"; and the Grokster decision certainly isn't the end of headaches for the P2P services, US lawmakers have warned them, Wired News reports.

Tech opps for students

Aspiring game designers can now get some training (and degree credits, too!) at US colleges and universities, reports Washington Post columnist Robert MacMillan in what's turned out to be a kind of series on the subject. Yesterday he pointed to a story about Michigan State in the Detroit Free Press, saying that MSU's program "comprises 15 credit hours gained over a sequence of four classes on the history and social aspects of video games as well as a primer on game design" (sounds like a student will have to intern at a gamemaking company to learn advanced design, but it's a start). Then Robert heard from readers around the country about game design programs at University of Louisiana, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Southern California, Case Western Reserve University, and Montgomery College in Maryland, and wrote about it today. As for the technology students take to school with them, the New York Times helpfully points out that different schools have different policies. For example, the Citadel in South Carolina doesn't support Macs, and Carleton College in Minnesota requires computers "new enough to work on our network." Here are some students' own views on tech at school, courtesy of the Times.

Search engine update

When Dogpile.com announced this week that it had added MSN Search to its collection, it also announced something any Web researcher should know: The top search engines turn up very different results. Dogpile cited the results of a University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University study "showing a surprising lack of duplication in the top results of the major search engines," Internet News reports.
"When the researchers ran 12,570 different queries through search engines at Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask Jeeves, they found that only 1.1% of the results appeared on all four engines, while 84.9% of the top results were unique to one engine." Dogpile is what's called a "meta-search service," meaning that the search results you get come from several regular search engines - in this case Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and now MSN Search. Parents will want to note that Dogpile.com does offer filtered searching (what I'd call a fundamental online-safety measure for connected households with kids), but it's a little harder to find than, say, MSN's or Google's SafeSearch (under "Settings" and "Preferences," respectively). When you're at the Dogpile.com home page, click on "Advanced," then scroll down to the bottom of that page to find "Adult Filter," then click on "Preferences" to turn the filter on and keep it on (unless/until someone changes the setting). To make this online-safety measure work, of course, it usually needs to go with a rule about how kids use only designated (filtered) search engines and may not turn filtering off (or they lose Internet privileges or some such consequence).

Student software

The 2005 crop of back-to-school tech products was much in the news this week. Microsoft's just-released Student 2006 - a $100 DVD "packed with organization tools, templates and content to help middle and high school students in a variety of subjects," USATODAY reports - got both top billing and mixed reviews. Well-known tech educator Kathy Shrock told USATODAY that having all those tools in one place means kids can focus more on the content of their reports, graphs, etc., where the focus needs to be. But the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg wrote that, though "a sound idea," Student is "really a thin veneer thrown over several existing Microsoft products [Encarta, Office, and Internet Explorer], rather than an integrated program designed from the ground up" (see the article for his conclusion). The Washington Post says Microsoft really did its homework in putting Student together but "could have gone deeper in many areas." Basically, the depth is in technology (that's complicated to learn). For content depth, check out two other products USATODAY mentions: Destination Math: Mastering Algebra ($59.99) and Instant Immersion: Spanish ($29.99). Another USATODAY piece looks at the question of computers for the preschool set.

A blog a second

That's blogging's rate of growth, the BBC reports: Somewhere in the world, a new blog is created every second, according to blog tracker and search engine Technorati.com's fairly conservative figures. Last summer, the rate was every 5.8 seconds, as TheRegister.com reported back then. That's 14.2 million blogs right now, up from 7.8 million in March. So the "blogosphere" (or blogging world) has doubled in five months. The Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy" looked at blog-measuring last May. For parents new to the concept, the New York Times has "Blogs 101." Other links that you might find helpful: "Bloggers vulnerable to hacks" and "A dad on kids' blogs: How father and daughter worked through the issues."

GTA game basically banned in Oz

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was effectively banned in Australia when the country's Office of Film and Literature Classification revoked its MA15+ rating after discovery of its hidden sexually explicit content, the BBC reports. MA15+ meant the game could only be sold to gamers over 15, and revoking the rating means San Andreas "can no longer be sold, hired, or advertised in Australia." Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this news out.

National child porn filter in Denmark

Denmark is joining Sweden in implementing nationwide filtering of online child pornography, DR NYHEDER reports in its English-language news. The filter "will block access to most child porn sites while at the same time informing people who try to enter these sites that they are breaking the law." Sweden introduced nationwide filtering in May "with great success," according to DR, adding that "some 10,000 attempts to access child porn on the Internet are currently blocked every day" in Sweden.

25% tax on Net porn?

That's what a group of US senators is proposing, but First Amendment experts say the legislation is unlikely to pass constitutional muster, CNET reports. For example, CNET cites the view of Prof. Jamin Raskin, who specializes in constitutional law at American University. The basic principle, Professor Raskin says, is that if you can't ban a certain category of expression, you can't tax it, and anti-Net porn laws so far haven't held up in the courts (e.g., the Communications Decency Act, struck down by the Supreme Court in '97, and the Child Online Protection Act, blocked by a federal court in '99). The new legislation in question is the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005, whose principal sponsor is Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) of Arkansas. The bill "would apply only to adult sites subject to controversial record-keeping requirements regarding the identities of people participating in sex acts displayed on Web sites," according to CNET. The sites would have to pay the 25% tax on their revenue and use verification before displaying any pornographic content. The Washington Post fills the picture in a little more: Among the bill's sponsors are Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) of Michigan, Sen. Tom Carper (D) of Delaware, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, Sen. Ken Salazar (D) of Colorado, and Sen. Mark Pryor (D) of Arkansas. Reps. Jim Matheson (D) of Utah and Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives. The Post also turned up a little more information on The Third Way, of which Senator Lincoln is an adviser. The think tank had pulled together some data on kids' exposure to porn which she used in introducing the Internet Safety bill last week (see my item on this.

As for violence in games, a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor by two professors cautions against lawmaking that challenges the Constitution without clear evidence that violence in games causes violence in real life. "Correlation does not equal causation," write Profs. Robert Richards and Clay Calvert, co-directors of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment.

Laptops for students

If you're thinking of buying a laptop for a student at your house, there's some great advice in tech news this week. Laptops are cheaper and more mainstream now, Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro points out, but they're no easier to purchase. "Manufacturers routinely skimp on features and capabilities - to save themselves a few dollars or so they can 'upsell' you other products and services - and it's up to you to spot what got left out." Worry less about processor speed and more about memory, pay attention to weight and battery life (of the one that comes installed, not the battery they want you to buy in addition), and think about a DVD-recordable drive, if only for backing up that hard drive, Rob suggests, among other valuable, practical tips. USATODAY's Kim Komando recommends laptops for college-bound people and tells why, but she fails to mention one important consideration. Yes, they're conveniently mobile, but they're also easier to steal. Make sure this is a consideration, and type "laptop security" into any search engine's window to find solutions.