Filtering too much

School filters overdo it, was the basic take-away from a study of US high-school English students' research. The study, conducted by Lynn Sutton, library director at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, found that "Internet filters are apt to block legitimate educational content," eSchool News reports. "Tech-savvy students … argue that administrators should have more faith in their judgment and ability to deal with inappropriate content, and they blame the school - not their teachers - for prohibiting them from conducting sound, unbiased research," according to eSchool News. The students, in both advanced rhetoric and basic composition classes, experienced both overblocking (of sites needed for their research) and underblocking (inappropriate content got through) in their Internet work. Sutton, whose study was part of a PhD dissertation, concluded that schools should "carefully consider" if filtering is necessary, at least at all grade levels. [See this item for the latest from Consumer Reports on filters.]

Zombie masters caught

I know, I sound so sci-fi. But there's nothing other-worldly about zombie masters, unfortunately. An awful lot of family PCs like yours and mine are "zombies" (computers that have been infected by Trojan software that gives control of them to the senders of the Trojan carrying worm or virus), unbeknownst to us! The "zombie masters" are the people who control whole networks (called "botnets") of these hijacked PCs to send spam (to make money) or launch denial-of-service attacks (against retail and other Web sites, sometimes for extortion money). Zombies in people's homes are by no means unusual. Microsoft, which has been working on this problem, believes "more than half of all spam is sent by zombies" and that there are tens of millions of zombies worldwide," CNET reports in an article about the company's progress in tracking zombie masters and shutting them down. Microsoft has identified 13 different spamming operations that use such zombies" so far, according to CNET. The US's Federal Trade Commission has been encouraging the Internet industry to take more action in this area. For example, it has asked Internet service providers (ISPs) to quarantine zombies and help us customers clean our infected PCs. For its ongoing investigation, "Microsoft intentionally created a zombie computer" - a PC not unlike one in anyone's household. "Over a three-week period, the PC was accessed 5 million times by its remote controllers and used to send out 18 million spam messages advertising more than 13,000 Web sites" (though Microsoft reportedly blocked the spam before it got sent). For more on this, see the latest from the Washington Post on local tech support and my "What if our computer's a zombie?!"

Samantha's bully-proofing tips

This week in the NetFamilyNewsletter, Part 2 on bullying and cyberbullying: some practical tips for kids and teens when confronted by a bully - online and/or offline. They're from Samantha Hahn, National American Miss Teen 2005, who shares these pointers (learned from her own multi-year experience with bullying), whenever she gives talks at schools.

Virtual real estate mogul

Now, here's an example of where the line between virtual and real is getting blurry. British-born, California-based indie film director and gamer Jon Jacobs just paid $100,000 for a piece of "real estate" in the Sweden-based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) "Project Entropia," UPI reports. Apparently, Jon considers the purchase of this "resort" (on an asteroid and still under development) an investment (or filmmaking inspiration), since the property "comes with mining and hunting taxation rights" in the "treacherous, but mineral-rich" Paradise V Asteroid Belt." As for other revenue streams, the as-yet-unnamed resort also comes with "a 1,000-unit apartment complex, a shopping mall, sports stadium and night club," a billboard marketing system and naming rights," the BBC reports. According to Sci-Tech-Today, Entropia, which has 299,359 registered players, "is known for its commercialization of virtual goods in the game. Most MMORPGs such as Everquest [which rely on subscription fees] discourage the sale of their virtual goods for real world currencies." Entropia, it adds, "sells tools and weapons that players use in the game for Project Entropia Dollars (PEDs)." The BBC says "typical items sold [in Entropia] include Repedge battle axes at 4.55 PEDs and Angelic Flakes at 1.48 PEDs" (10 PEDs = $1 US).

Amazing gamers' lives

There are gamers who make a living "leveling up" other gamers' characters. I realize this begs a question, so here's an example: Qing Xuwei in China "used to make 10,000 yuan [about $1,200] a month by power-leveling other people's game characters while they are away from the game. He wrote and runs software programs (on seven computers) that increase the strength and status of clients' game characters while they're on vacation or otherwise not playing (so they don't lose any ground in the game), the BBC reports. Another gamer earns $70,000/year creating female characters' clothing (aha! designers of virtual fashion now!). Yet another, the BBC reports, is "a 'robot tailor,' designing robot costumes" for game characters - a niche market, "but he still earns $250 a month." Back in the States, here, the Washington Post describes the more "traditional" way of making money as a gamer: just being very good and going pro. Referring to Kyle Miller in Virginia, the Post says, "He drives a Bimmer. He attracts the ladies. He's got sponsors. He trains hard. He plays harder. He's 21." And for four years he has "consistently dominated Counter-Strike, an online shooter game whose 2.8 million active players generate more monthly Internet traffic than all of Italy." And here's CNET on "getting girls in the game."

Porn on video iPod?

It's hard not to be skeptical, but Wired News reports that "the adult industry is largely staying away" from this new video venue. The article cites the view of L.R. Clinton Fayling, president of Brickhouse Mobile, "a Denver company that is licensing adult material for mobile phones," saying the adult industry's "largely staying away" out of concern about litigation and legislation (that would happen because the iPod's so popular with young people). But Wired News does name some smaller adult-content companies that are jumping right in. And Playboy and other companies are already producing for PlayStation portable handheld game device (see my 4/22 issue). [Thanks to Bob Dahlstrom, CEO of Kidsnet, for pointing this piece out.]

11-year-olds networking

Remember when networking was a new concept, something we grownups were told to embrace in order to be successful? Well now, the Los Angeles Times points out, "if a typical 11-year-old heard such advice presented as innovative strategy, he or she would collapse laughing." Today's middle-schoolers are networking-proficient - online and off. And their social circles are huge compared to ours, when we were kids. "Now kids' ability to reach out to those they've just met, hold onto those they know, and bring disparate parts of their lives together with the touch of a key has changed the boundaries and definition of social life," according to the Times, and they are enabled by IM, email, cellphones, and online games - even "new kids." For example, "a 7th-grader hands the new kid in school a dozen IM screen names, and within a week, she's 'talking' to all her new classmates, even the ones she's too timid to approach in person." Check out the article for other fascinating examples. But the New York Times reports that some parents are concerned that all this online socializing might be "interfering with growing up." And the Richmond.com in Virginia zooms in on kids' preference for IM and phone texting over email.

Catholic school nixes blogging

Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, N.J., has "ordered its students … to remove personal postings about the school or themselves from Web sites like MySpace.com or Xanga.com," Newsday reports. After a blogging incident in which a student thought he was "talking" to a peer and wasn't, the school held an assembly for all 900 students to "reinforce the online rules." This rule had been on the books for years, but now it's being strictly enforced - for protection, not censorship, the school said. The Electronic Frontier Foundation told Newsday it had seen several efforts by private institutions around the US to restrict students' "Internet postings," but this was the first "overreaction" the EFF had heard of, adding that it would be better to talk with students about what is and isn't safe online. Students at this school who don't comply could be suspended. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this story out.] For more on this, see "Teacher to parents: Be wary of teen blogs" and "MySpace: The new MTV." And here's a local perspective (and primer) on teen blogging from the Wausau [Wisc.] Daily Herald.

UK's first Net suicide pact

Britain's Home Office is urging Internet companies to make it tougher for people to access Web sites and chatrooms about suicide, The Guardian reports. "The move comes after two strangers forged Britain's first Internet suicide pact, dying side by side two days after making contact for the first time on a chatroom dedicated to discussions about suicide." Other countries, especially Japan, have seen some tragedies like this (see this at the BBC), so UK psychiatrists are concerned this incident may be the start of a trend in their country. What happened was the deaths in a car in a southeast London shopping center parking lot of two people who had nothing in common "before making contact on one of the most frequently-visited suicide chatrooms" but an "interest in computers and their history of depression." See also a Wired News series on assisted suicide online, leading with the fact that anyone can type "suicide" into any search engine window and find "a handful of pages where suicidal strangers counsel each other on the best way to die." [Thanks to QuickLinks for pointing the UK story out.]

ID theft fear's impact

A new Consumer Reports WebWatch study has found that some of us are cutting back on our Web use because of concerns about identity theft, Wired News reports. Nearly a third of the some 1,500 people surveyed nationwide say they're using the Web less and "some 80% … say they're at least somewhat concerned someone could steal their identity from personal information on the Internet." Most have stopped giving out personal information on the Web and 25% have stopped shopping online.

Netherlands: Kid phones

Two Dutch phone companies have unveiled cellphones just for kids, the iKids and the Buddy Bear, the latter targeting 4-to-9-year-olds, The Register reports. The iKids has "a built in GPS receiver, which remains working even when the phone isn't activated. Parents can select three 'safety zones,' areas where their children are allowed to play. If they wander off to another area, parents receive an SMS message. They can also look up the child's whereabouts on a virtual map." Very cool, but one just hopes no one other than a parent can track the phone's young owner.

Webcams for far-flung families

At least the article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a sentence about the downside of an upbeat article about keeping in touch with Webcams. It's great that Miyako Gondo in Tokyo gets to see her 13-month-old granddaughter nearly every day because little Anika's parents have a Web camera connected to the family PC. Let's just hope the parents know to monitor Anika's use of the Webcam when she gets old enough to surf the Net herself. As the Post-Gazette puts it, "Some humans even use Web cameras to engage in voyeuristic adults-only behavior not suitable for detailed discussion in a family newspaper." Law-enforcement people have told me that sexual predators send kids Webcams as "gifts," something parents easily miss because they come in such small packages. Just another reminder that most technology also has a downside parents need to be aware of (for other concerning uses, see also "Closer look at 'camgirls' sites," 2/7/03, and "Teen 'antics'-cum-child porn"). As for the numbers, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found recently that, "on any given day, about two million internet users are checking out remote places or people by using Webcams."

Can-spam law: MI parents irked

It's great to hear parents' voices in the spam debate! Michigan's anti-porn-spam law, designed to protect kids, hasn't been enforced yet, and parents are frustrated, the Detroit Free Press reports. "Beginning Aug. 1, the Michigan Children's Protection Registry Act was supposed to stop companies from sending messages pitching products and services that are illegal for minors to use to e-mail addresses on a state-maintained list. But the law hasn't been effective because it isn't being enforced - or advertised much - while the state Legislature tidies up some of its language." Two more laws designed to do that clarifying have passed the state Senate but haven't yet made it through the House of Representatives or to the governor's desk for signing, the Free Press adds. The state government has received calls, emails, and letters from "angry parents." Some of them are joining the original critics of these and similar legislation in Utah who say it's impractical to think that porn spammers in, for example, Russia will check their email lists against the state of Michigan's do-not-email registry, as the law says they must do or be fined. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this news out.]

To learn mashing, remixing...

…go to SoundJunction.org. Targeting musicians and students 13-18, it's a new UK-based site that encourages users to explore original compositions from Hip Hop to classical to jazz to West African, "discover how the music works," and then mix and mash it up! "Three pieces were written especially for the site by musicians Jason Yard, Tunde Jegede and David Horn," the BBC reports, adding that "the site has more than 50 hours of audio and video footage which help people learn about how musical traditions have been shaped through the ages" and "hundreds of interactive articles" explaining the histories of various kinds of music and telling about the lives of musicians and how they were influenced. Just one exciting thing about this site from a young user's perspective: Its creators are thinking about allowing users to download their compositions onto phones as ringtones. SoundJunction.org is part of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, a 100+-year-old organization that provides music exams and assessments in 92 countries. For more on remixing, see "The age of mash-ups," "Come and get it," and "Net music's next step."

ID theft: Fact & fiction

Some people will be comforted to hear that they're more likely to have their identity stolen in "real life" than on the Internet. "Fraud artists can bribe employees of banks or credit card companies who have access to confidential records, or they can pose as an employer or landlord to get a copy of your credit report, or simply steal a wallet, purse or your mail. One of the most common ways that information is snatched is through lost credit cards. All of those techniques are more frequent than any methods using the Internet," CNET reports in a thorough FAQ on the subject. It goes on to say what's done with our info after it's obtained, what we can do about it, and how to protect ourselves in the first place - even what software to buy to wipe our hard drives before getting rid of old PCs (a must).

Librarians: Digital Age heroes

Anyone who thinks all we need is Google or a parent of any such person might enjoy reading a Des Moines Register article about that city's reference heroes. There's Deborah Kolb, who "has worked at the Central Library since 1972. She says that young people seem startled that everything can't be found via Google" - so she takes them, for example, to "a relic - the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature - to look up old magazine articles on Woodstock for a school report." And there's the awful but revealing (of what librarians have to deal with) account of how "35-year library veteran Dorothy Kelley" managed the rescue of a 20-month-old child whom "a convicted sex offender" grabbed and dragged to the library men's room (police later said the "the library staff conducted a 'masterful tactical response'"). The staff later received a plant and a note from grateful "Des Moines mothers." And there's "Pam Deitrick, a librarian who started working here part-time in high school in 1969. When a parent dies, she helps the grieving caller try to remember the name of the song he wants to play at the funeral." As for everyday heroism, though, the Register rightfully points out that it's because we're so awash in information these days that we need librarians more than ever.

Bullying/cyberbullying: Samantha's story

When Samantha Hahn, National American Miss Teen 2005, was in 6th grade, her best friend started a mean rumor about her, circulating it through their circle of friends. Soon it seemed the whole school had turned against her - "kids in other grades, kids I'd never met before. I didn't even know who they were and they had comments about me." The abuse continued on into cyberspace, via email and IMs, and also got physical. Well into high school, Samantha experienced just about every form of bullying, but now, as she works on her B.A. and prepares for the Miss New Jersey competition, she's using her experience to educate students, parents, educators, and law-enforcement people throughout New Jersey and is starting to get speaking requests from other states. To read her story, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

1.6 million witches

That's one of the projected figures for this year's trick-or-treaters, courtesy of New York Times online-shopping goddess Michelle Slatalla and mother of Clementine (8), who does not plan to be a witch this year or, quite probably, any year. Clementine, who - frighteningly - has mastered the skill of one-click shopping, always chooses to be royal for Halloween, and this year to be an "Elizabeth-ian Queen" (Target.com, $42.99). Don't miss the photo with this fun piece - it illustrates that there are choices in the witch category, with "Sweet Witch" and "Pretty Princess Witch" depicted.

'Beyond GTA': Bats not guns

Any parent curious about what the creators of Grand Theft Auto are up to these days would enjoy reading a New York Times profile of Dan Houser, 31-year-old co-founder and creative VP of Rockstar Games (who granted a rare interview). The GTA series of games has "sold more than 50 million copies since 2001, generating more than $1 billion in revenue," according to the Times. [Rockstar is about to release the sixth, "GTA: Liberty City Stories" - see "The power of games."] The new project, for Xbox and PlayStation 2, is "The Warriors," also a fighting game. It's not a first-person shooter, but it's violent, as its "Mature" (18+) rating indicates. As in the 1979 cult movie of the same name, "players portray members of a multi-racial street gang in 1970s-era New York City," ABC News reports, "armed with chains and baseball bats." Here's GameSpy.com's review of the Xbox version . Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times looks at the growth of advertising in videogames.

iPods, blogs: Learning tools

In Ms. Gagliolo's classroom, 5th-graders record their poems, book reports, interviews and sounds on field trips, etc. and turn them into podcasts, the Washington Post reports. Podcasts are the personal "radio shows" that more and more people are creating, that can be downloaded to an iPod or other MP3 player, and that Apple now provides for free in iTunes' podcast directory. In fact, Ms. Gagliolo's students could submit their podcasts to iTunes for the listening public! Other examples, the Post mentions: "In a private school near Detroit, middle-schoolers podcast performances of student-composed musical works. From East Oakland, Calif., high-schoolers paint an audio portrait, in English and Spanish, of their troubled community." Teachers have been doing similarly creative motivational work with classroom blogs for a while now. CNET links to some great examples and looks at some new tools that make classroom blogging a little less public, a little safer.

Toys: 'No thanks, Mom & Dad'

Reeling from kids' declining interest in toys, toymakers are moving into electronics in a big way, the New York Times reports. There's LeapFrog's TicTalk cellphone for 6+-year-olds, Disney's Mix Sticks digital music player, and Hasbro's Zoombox projector. Of course, some tweens simply go overnight from playing with Bratz dolls to playing an iPod, the Times reports, pointing to the discussion this trend is fueling among parents and child development experts. "The push to sell consumer electronics to preteens is touching off an animated debate about … whether it is wise to break down one of the last barriers between children's play and adult technology." All that technology eclipses creative play and imagination, critics say. Another big question, for toymakers, is whether children will want the kid versions of these products or just move right on to the "real" ones.

P2P: Family info overexposed?

"Extreme file-sharing" is what the Washington Post headline writer calls it, and that's an understatement. On the family PCs they're using to swap tunes, file-sharers are sharing tax and payroll records, medical records, bank statements, emails, etc. Post PC security writer Brian Krebs writes in his blog that he found all of that and more while "poking around Limewire, an online peer-to-peer file-sharing network where an estimated 2 million users share and swap MP3 files, movies, software titles and just about anything and everything else made up of ones and zeroes (including quite a few virus-infected files)." He's not the first - see this '02 study at HP labs. Pass along this good advice from Brian to any file-sharers at your house: "If you're going to use file-sharing networks, be extremely careful about what you download; and, pay close attention to the files and folders you are letting the rest of the world see." [For more, see "File-sharing realities for families."]

Teen sex ed online

"About half of teens go online for health information, and they have more questions about sex than they do about any other topic," USATODAY reports, citing research unveiled at a recent American Academy of Pediatrics meeting. The article links to five sites recommended by adolescent health experts, including the six-year-old TeenHealthFX.com and Sexetc.org (a Google search of "teen health information" gets about 21.4 million results).

Child-porn spam: More aggressive

In the Internet Age, children's first exposure to sexuality often happens when they stumble on something in email or on the Web. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police sex crimes unit reiterates that in a Toronto Sun article about a particularly egregious example: a piece of spam email in circulation with horrific child-porn images (not just links) right in the body of an email that has nothing in its subject line - "just the latest in an increasingly aggressive campaign by online marketers of child porn." Canada's child-exploitation hotline, Cybertip.ca, has received at least 10 reports about this email, according to the Sun. "About half of all child pornography complaints received by Cybertip.ca is related to email spam," it adds. If your kids have email accounts, tell them to be sure to delete immediately, never open, any emails from anyone they don't know because they increasingly contain pictures no child should ever have to see. At the bottom of the Sun article are tips about what to do if you ever do receive such an email. [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (which runs the US equivalent of Cyberip.ca - CyberTipline.com (800.843.5678) - for pointing this piece out.]

Gaming for peace!

The world of gaming is certainly not all first-person shooters. An online game that was released by the UN's World Food Programme last spring - "Food Force," "in which players must figure out how to feed thousands of people on a fictitious island" - has been downloaded 2 million times, the Washington Post reports. That's half the number of players claimed by the world's most popular online game, World of Warcraft." And FF is not the only game project about "saving the world through peace and democracy." The Post points to "PeaceMaker," a game being developed at Carnegie Mellon University in which "you win by negotiating peace between Israelis and Palestinians"; the University of Southern California's just-launched competition "to develop a game that promotes international goodwill toward the United States"; and an MTV contest to come up with a videogame that fights genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

New patch: Caution note

Microsoft issued October's PC security patches last Tuesday, but later reported one of them was causing some users major computer problems - but "only when default permission settings on a Windows directory have been changed," CNET reports. If your settings haven't been, you're fine, and Microsoft says the patch is still needed. If your permission settings have been changed, you probably already know what can happen: users locked out of their PCs, Windows Firewall not starting, certain software not running, an empty network connections folder, "among other things"! There's a guide to restoring "the default permissions and the COM+ catalog" at Microsoft's Web site. Meanwhile, you are not alone: Here's one very tech-literate PC owner's account, at the Washington Post, of how complicated it was even for him to get his patches up-to-date after his laptop was "repaired."

Tablet PCs on the rise

Those portable PCs that are more writing- than keyboard-oriented have been around for a while, but the New York Times reports that now they're finally coming into their own. "The two main types of tablet PCs are the slate model, a book-shaped computer with a pen, and the convertible model, which includes a keyboard and closely resembles a laptop," the Times reports. "Both types run the same programs as other Windows-based computers, but all of the mouse actions can be performed by touching the pen to the screen." Soon touchscreens will be an option too. Though prices are coming down, they're not a cheap solution, though. The lowest cost one among the products the Times mentions is $1,100. It also discusses software that runs on these PCs.

Net 'lite' for the unwired

It may be just the thing for those uncles, aunts, and grandparents who've been meaning to learn email to keep in touch with the kids but never got around to it. Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro says AMD's $300 "Personal Internet Communicator" isn't the first basic, easy, secure, and plug-'n'-play box for newbies, but it's the best yet. It does everything most of us want to do with the virus-vulnerable PC - Web, email (via Web browser) - but it's not for multitaskers and not much cheaper than today's regular desktops, once you add a screen (keyboard and mouse are included). On the other hand, it is mindless and much more secure, and software gets updated automatically.

The MMORPG experience

Researchers are studying it, professors are teaching about it. I'm referring to the virtual worlds of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). The most successful to date is World of Warcraft (WOW), with 4 million players worldwide, a quarter of them in North America, the Christian Science Monitor reports in an in-depth look at what draws so many players. Writer Greg Lamb leads with the story of 16-year-old WOW player Trevor, who was pretty obsessed with it for a while, much to his mom's concern. "But then … Trevor started his junior year of high school and began a part-time job. He decided he needed to cut way back. Now he plays at most a few hours a week." That is actually not unusual for most WOW players, Greg reports, noting a small minority for whom temporary obsession "can lead to bad habits or worse." He goes on to describe how social MMORPGs are for many players, how much there is to explore in these vast "worlds," how playing with real people behind characters provides spontaneity and unpredictability that keep it very interesting. Then there are gender issues (the pluses and minuses of having a male or female character) and economic ones (the opportunity to buy and sell virtual objects and real estate with real money).

Meanwhile, CNET points to new research in Germany showing a "short-term causal relationship" between first-person shooter game play and "brain-activity patterns" considered characteristic of "aggressive cognitions and effects." The researchers watched the brain activity of 13 guys between the ages of 18 and 26 while they played "Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror." They were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system while playing. "The research will appear in the January 2006 edition of Media Psychology," CNET adds.

Parents (in 2 countries) on games

Julie in Florida writes about her 14-year-old son's experience with Halo 2 and how kids view game chat with Xbox Live (the online version of Halo 2, connecting players worldwide). Tito in Portugal tells of what it's like to deal with the video and online game interests of sons aged 8, 14, and 24! Tito's experience shows how universal many tech-parenting issues are. Please see this week's issue of my newsletter for their stories.

Laptops for Third World kids

"A rugged $100 laptop specifically for primary and secondary school students in the Third World." It's the brainchild of MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte, the San Jose Mercury News reports, and it's becoming a reality, with the help of Mary Lou Jepson, who was poised to become one of those serial Silicon Valley start-up founders. But before starting her second company, she decided to take her idea for a low-cost laptop screen to the non-profit association Negroponte formed, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Jepsen told the Mercury News she wanted to do something more meaningful. OLPC's idea is that "inexpensive laptops could connect children to the Internet and give them access to textbooks that would be too expensive to distribute in print." Also the world's education ministries are more likely to listen to and adopt the technology of a nonprofit organization than a commercial entity, the thinking goes.

Yahoo shutting down pedo chat

In an agreement with the attorneys general of New York and Nebraska, Yahoo said it will "institute systemwide controls over chat rooms likely to be frequented by child predators," Reuters reports. After barring the creation of any new chatrooms by users in June, according to the Associated Press, Yahoo shut down some 70,000 existing chatrooms with names that suggested the chatrooms were about or supported illegal adult-child sex (11.4% of the 614,000 chatroom names Yahoo reviewed, according to Reuters). The Internet company apparently will reinstitute user-created chatrooms for people 18+, but said yesterday it will "prescreen the names of all user-created chat rooms if it restores the ability to create them…. Should any slip through, Yahoo must purge such chat rooms within 24 hours from when it becomes aware of them," according to its agreement with the attorneys general. "It was not clear how the company would prevent children from signing up as adults," the AP added (if Yahoo has a tech tool for this, it would benefit from licensing it to a lot of blogging sites and other online businesses!). Yahoo has also eliminated the "Teen" chat category, the AP reports. Earlier this year, "an undercover investigator, posing as a 14-year-old while visiting one of those chat rooms, received 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period, the attorneys general said. Here's my coverage of this in June.

Video iPod: Mom's-eye-view

A couple of misc. things come to mind as I think about the *family tech* implications of this big development in digital media. We all knew music videos had moved into cyberspace, but now they're on iTunes; now they're *really* mainstream and easy to find. I went there yesterday, when the iPod Video was announced, and noticed some of the videos had little "Explicit" labels next to them (I couldn't find them today). I clicked on one, and the video was sexually suggestive, though didn't display full-frontal nudity. You get where I'm going with this - will Apple and other digital-music providers to come need to start wrestling with ratings and get into age verification, as the cellphone industry is beginning to do (because it wants to make money on porn)? The 2nd thought that occurred is the $1.99 price for music videos and single TV shows, which - as the New York Times's David Pogue pointed out in his email newsletter today - is a brilliant impulse-buy price ("How on earth did Apple persuade ABC/Disney to sell its shows for $2 an episode?" David wondered). I'm thinking, now here's another serious challenge for a young digital-music fan's monthly allowance (along with cellphone minutes and text messages). These little impulse buys are *really* going to add up, a bit like the impact of Starbucks lattes on grownups' wallets. Just stuff to think of that - never enough of that!

Early look at Xbox 360

A handful of journalists got a peek at the next-generation Xbox 360 in San Francisco the other day, and CNET's writer raved. "This is one impressive machine," Dan Terdlman reports. He and the rest of the privileged few got to play with the 13 consoles on display. They spoke with a wizard in the world of "Kameo" (the "stunning graphics … brought even the blades of grass to life") and raced Ferraris ("the things I did to that poor Ferrari were a shame"). The New York Times's preview zoomed in on Microsoft's effort to broaden its market with this console: "Note to hard-core video game players: Microsoft says it is aiming for your mothers and wives." Game consoles' "traditional" market is males 17-24.

Buddies: MSN & Yahoo Messengers

They're now on each other's buddy lists. Microsoft and Yahoo announced they'll have their IM services interoperable (meaning MSN Messenger folk will actually be able to IM with friends using Yahoo Messenger) by June 2006, Good Morning Silicon Valley reports. AIM has dominated instant-messaging to date, with 51.5 million US users. This development puts the combined MSN and Yahoo services, with a total of about 50 million users, right in the running.

iPod goes video!

Apple set the price for digital tunes, now it has set the price for music videos: $1.99. Two thousand of them are available at iTunes so far (some labeled as "explicit," at least in iTunes 5, which I haven't yet upgraded). But Apple's really big news today is the iPod Video on which to play these, as well as TV shows, which are also now on offer for $1.99. Examples the Wall Street Journal provides are "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," through its deal with Disney/ABC. The much-anticipated iPod Video "boasts a 2.5-inch wide color screen that is larger than those on standard iPods, though the device is 30% thinner than its predecessor. Apple said the new device, which will begin shipping next week, can hold up to 150 hours of video or 15,000 songs." There's a 30-gigabyte version for $299 and a 60-gigabyte one for $399." Still, the Journal suggests, video's a "risky bet for Apple," because of the film and TV industries' concerns about piracy. CNET adds that Apple "also rolled out a new iMac" and of course the new, video-rich version of iTunes, launched just five weeks after the debut of iTunes 5. The new iMac G5 is like the current one, only thinner. Prices are $1,200 for the 17-inch and $1,600 for the 20-inch, and it comes with a remote so that it can be watched like a TV. This just in: USATODAY's how-to on how iPod Video works.

Teen blogger charged with murder

STLpunk.com is a perfectly respectable blogging service for punk rock fans that last summer reached the million-visitors-a-month mark, but now its creator, Jerome Gaynor finds himself saying about posts in the site: "I'm completely shocked and depressed about where things have gone…. There are certain things - threats, excessive obscenity, advocating racial violence, disgusting insults against dead children - that simply cannot be tolerated. I am going to make it easier to report and remove things like this. I now need to figure out how to … make some time to restructure the juggernaut of teen mayhem that this corny little website has become." One reason why Jerome posted that on his service's home page is because of a 17-year-old St. Louis boy "whose blog on STLpunk.com came to light last week after he was charged with the murder of classmate Erin Mace, 16, of Fenton [Mo.]," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Erin also had a blog at STLpunk.com, which linked to that of the boy charged with her murder, as did his to hers. "His entries painted a picture of loneliness and despair." The writer of this thoughtful, very thorough article talked with psychologists, police, and educators about how they view and handle this digital-age phenomenon - as a tool for teen venting, role-playing, self-validating, experimenting, threatening, soul-baring, and socializing, as well as for police work, counseling, and parenting. Articles like this are fuel for a very important discussion that needs to be going on wherever in the world teenagers are blogging. [Here's our latest feature on this, "A mom writes: Teen solicited in MySpace."]

CA game law's future not assured

The event didn't get a lot of fanfare, but Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law last week legislation that bans sales of violent videogames to minors. The gamemakers' trade association announced shortly afterwards that it would file a lawsuit to strike the law down, Reuters reports. It'll be interesting to see if this particular state law survives. "Federal courts have ruled against similar legislation in Washington state, the city of Indianapolis and St. Louis County in Missouri, finding the laws violated free speech guarantees in the U.S. Constitution," according to Reuters. But Illinois and Michigan have passed similar laws (the Entertainment Software Assoc. is fighting these too), and US Sen. Hillary Clinton is working on federal-level legislation. Here's earlier coverage of the California move.

'Videogame addiction' in Korea

The addiction question is a perennial, most recently raised again by the Associated Press in Seoul. There appear to be downsides to being "the world's most wired country," in which 70% of the population has broadband Net access. Korea is where a 28-year-old cybercafe gamer died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing the multiplayer online game Starcraft (see our coverage) and where 27-year-old Jun, who led the article, kicked his gaming habit after getting head and shoulder aches from playing for 15 hours at a stretch. South Korea has 17 million gamers, the AP reports, "some 35% of the population, principally males in their teens and twenties." It adds that, "at the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among young South Koreans, they'll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on end." One wonders where the parents are, at least for the gamers in their teens. Excess, not the games themselves, seem to be more causative, but environment seems to be a factor too - time spent in a space that's very supportive of excessive gaming, where a gamer's budget seems to be the only restriction. Korean psychologists are getting concerned, according to the AP. "The number of counseling sessions for game addiction quadrupled last year," reports the AP, citing government figures.

PC security: The big Q

PC owners know they've got to have security software, but why does it have to be so complicated? That's the question on a lot of minds, Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro knows. Rob says both McAfee and Symantec's security suites really only excel in the antivirus area. But fortunately the situation's improving, he adds. With Microsoft's Service Pack 2 package of security updates, everybody got an effective firewall (another leg of the 3-legged security school, the 1st and 2nd being antivirus protection and keeping up with patches, which is now automated for most Windows PC owners). Plus, Microsoft "has since released a surprisingly good (though still in beta test) anti-spyware tool" (which is becoming the 4th leg on the morphing security stool). For anyone not getting automatic patches, here are Microsoft's instructions on how to turn on this important security feature.

Get the new patches!

The October security patches for Windows PCs - nine of them - are now available, Microsoft announced today. The page has instructions for hand-installing the updates or for using Automatic Updates - as well as general instructions on how to protect your PC. Here's the Washington Post on what the patches are for. More on this at ZDNET.

Google's big picture

In case students and other Web researchers were holding their breath till Google's spider bots had crawled all the Net's information, we now know that would not be good for their health. Even though a contributor takes a visual guess (on today's New York Times opinion page) as to how much info the search engine will cover in 2084 (including what's in "Your Brain"), Google has just released its "300-year plan." Its CEO Eric Schmidt "estimates that Google won't manage to index all the world's information until around the 24th century," ZDNET UK reports. How are they doing right now? "Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed," ZDNET says Schmidt told his audience at an Association of National Advertisers conference in Phoenix.

The power of games: Insights

Videogames are all over tech news these days, as we enter the holiday shopping season; as Microsoft unveils games for its next-generation Xbox 360, due to be released next month; as the sixth Grand Theft Auto first-person-shooter game is about to hit store shelves; and as Halo goes mobile and into film (produced by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings). For this week's issue of my newsletter, I interviewed experienced gamer David, 16, in Washington State for his view on what makes these alternate-world games so compelling.

X-rated content & other gaming news

Videogame news was hot this week, no doubt in anticipation of the holiday shopping season. Here's a sampler: After the X-rated "Hot Coffee" mod hit the headlines, the spotlight moved to "Adult"-rated games - the "dozens of games that address sexual issues, sexuality and sex itself, ranging from Cyberlore's 'Playboy: The Mansion' to Sierra Entertainment's 'Leisure Suit Larry.' Downloadable nude 'skins' have even been created by third-parties to (un)clothe characters in Electronic Arts' best-selling 'The Sims'." CNET reports. Here's the latest from the Washington Post on university-level game-design programs and from CNET, on the "State of Play" conference, where "leading thinkers on the social, intellectual, economic and legal aspects" of games gather each year. Xbox 360 "got game" this week, as Microsoft unveiled a passel of games for the next-generation Xbox 360 to hit store shelves next month; Reuters reports. Meanwhile, Halo, "one of the biggest video game franchises in the world," is moving into cellphones, IGM.com reports; the movie version will be produced by Peter Jackson of "Lord of the Rings" fame, the BBC reports. Two more signs of gaming's gathering power: 1) Nickelodeon's "Jungle Boy" will make its debut and build its franchise in videogames, then be a TV show, rather than the usual other way around, the New York Times reports, and 2) a new study found that "in-game ad campaigns resulted in a 60% increase in awareness of new brands," CNET reports. But the Chinese government is applying some brakes: Beijing will impose a three-hour limit on online game play. "The measures are designed to combat addiction to … games such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II," the BBC reports, adding that 20 million Chinese play games regularly, mainly in Internet cafes, and last year Chinese spent almost $500 million (US) on online games.

Digital music's great divide

Helpfully for online music fans (who may not be technophiles), the New York Times has the "Basics" today on digital music's big file-format divide - the one between Apple's AAC format (found at iTunes and played in iPods) and Microsoft's WMA format (found at Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, etc. and played on non-iPod players). In between is the more agnostic MP3 format, but not the default one for any of the services and thus a pain to convert to. The Times says "the safest strategy, and one popular among audio purists, is to purchase music on compact discs and rip it to the MP3 format," but read the whole article to understand why. And here's the Washington Post on the sound quality of AAC, WMA, and MP3.

File-sharing's future

What will it be like for the some 10 million people using P2P services at any given moment around the world? The Washington Post looked at that question, but I don't think it's fully answered yet. I hope any readers who have file-sharing experts at their house will send me their answers! The Post says that "in the simplest terms, the P2P sites will begin using a filter to keep users from trading copyrighted songs and movies that have not been licensed for sale" and will start charging for content that has been, "ponying up a yet-undetermined fee for each song, and performers and songwriters will get a cut of that fee in royalties." Here's an ensuing discussion on this at the Post among writer Frank Ahrens and his readers. For any file-sharer asking "whither BitTorrent?" (or something like that), the San Jose Mercury News has the latest on that P2P technology, as it goes commercial. For the basics on file-sharing, see "File-sharing realities for families" at NetFamilyNews.

A mom coutersues RIAA

This is actually big news, since only a handful of the some 15,000 people sued by the RIAA for file-sharing have actually countersued. Most have settled with the RIAA out of court, paying the RIAA several thousand dollars. In this case, a single mother in Oregon, Tanya Andersen, accused of "illegally downloading 1,400 gangsta rap tunes is countersuing the music industry for allegedly violating Oregon's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO)," Internet News reports. The RIAA is seeking more than $1 million in damages, but Anderson says she never downloaded a single song. Her lawyer told Internet News that "Andersen contacted the Settlement Support Center [a company created by the RIAA to work out settlements with the targets of its litigation] and professed her innocence. The Center claims there is evidence Andersen downloaded songs at 4:30 a.m. under the log-in name of 'gotenkito.' Andersen again denied the claim, said she had never used or heard of the log-in name in question and asked that the Settlement Support Center." Please see the article for what happened next.

MP3 players just for kids

Yet another sign of how huge digital music is becoming. Disney's Mix Sticks are beginner MP3 players (MP3 players with training wheels, perhaps?). CNET reports that they're able to download tunes and copy them from a CD, but also play them off memory cards called Mix Clips that feature music music from Walt Disney Records. "Disney Mix Sticks have a storage capacity of 128MB, enough for about 60 songs, and work with a USB 2.0 connector. The MP3 players also feature an SD/MMC card slot for as much as 1GB of storage, or approximately 500 songs. The MP3 player, available in stores in mid-October, will sell for about $49. Its battery will last for about eight hours, after which it can be recharged in the Jam Stand, which will be sold separately for about $40. Here are CNET's photos of the Mix Stick, which comes in four colors, including plain chrome, the Jam Stand, Mix Clips, and yet another purchase opp: a carrying case.

Poker's rise: Fresh numbers

About 2.9 million US 14-to-22-year-olds gamble with cards (mostly poker), and the number's on the rise, reports the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, which has been watching this trend. Card players are more likely to gamble online - Annenberg estimates that about 580,000 14-to-22-year-olds gamble in Web sites on a weekly basis. More than half (54.5%) of self-identified weekly gamblers reported having at least one of the symptoms of problem gambling: preoccupation, over-spending, tolerance, and withdrawal. That's up from 44.95% in 2004. Then there's the money: "We also asked persons who gamble at least once a month if their gambling ever led to their owing people money and, if so, the highest amount they had ever owed. About 10% answered that it had. We estimated conservatively the average debt to be close to $74. (We excluded one respondent who claimed he owed as much as $10,000.) This level of indebtedness would amount to over $115 million for the population of approx. 16 million monthly gamblers ages 14 to 22." Here's the study's press release in pdf format and the Center's own page for more on its research. Here's earlier NFN coverage, linking to a thorough look at the phenomenon by Sports Illustrated and naming key gambling sites, for parents wanting to monitor online gambling.

*Lots* more worms in IM, P2P

Heads up, parents! Increasingly, the worms are where the kids are online. "Instant-messaging and peer-to-peer fans are being hit with more worm and malicious code attacks than ever before," CNET reports. Detected threats in IM services and on file-sharing networks were up a *huge* 3,295% the third quarter of this year, according to IMlogic research CNET cites. Not only that, the attacks are getting smarter: "Worm writers are coming up with more effective ways to get people to click on links to their malicious code, and worms can increasingly hop from one IM network to another." MSN Messenger was hit hardest (reflecting its popularity), with 62% of detected attacks overall, AIM and ICQ got 31%, and Yahoo Messenger 7%. Tell kids to be really careful about what links and files they click on in IM and file-sharing, even - in the case of IM - when the messages look like they're from friends. Hackers and/or their malicious code have figured out how to disguise themselves as friends (by hijacking buddy lists on infected PCs, for example). If you feel you want to click on a link from a "friend," first start a new conversation or window with that buddy and ask him/her if s/he sent the IM. Click *only* if s/he did! See also "IM risks & tips" from a tech-literate dad.

Dial-up on steroids

It's getting so the only difference between accelerated dial-up and slower broadband Internet service is the fact that, with the former, you still have to dial up! Speed and price differences are becoming negligible, the Boston Globe points out in a very thorough look at home Net users' current options. But there's an upside to not having the Internet "on" all the time, in the case of dial-up users: a little less risk of having the family PC become a zombie. Computers that aren't available all the time to outsiders seeking to take control of them are a lot harder to manipulate in denial-of-service attacks and for spam distribution. Herb Lin of the National Research Council last year pointed out another advantage of slower connections for families with online kids, linking inconvenience and kids' safety (see my 4/23/04 issue).

Teen blogs help police

Generally, law enforcement is concerned about teen blogging (see "Teen solicited in MySpace" and this Little Rock, Ark. TV report). But here's a case where the technology is helping police. Probably because of her blogging, the case of Taylor Marie Behl, 17, who "disappeared from a Richmond university four weeks ago," the Washington Post reports, is now being viewed by police as that of abduction, not just a missing-person case. Because of Behl's blogs, the Post adds, police are "privy to the disagreements that Behl had with her parents, her emotions on any given day, even her sexual exploits … [it] recorded her moods, her crushes, her insecurities in 50 entries she posted online over the span of 12 months." The Internet, in fact, "has emerged as a virtual tip machine that often maps the course of an investigation. The girl hasn't been found, but there's a suspect in custody, arrested on charges of possession of child pornography, a 38-year-old man who'd posted in Behl's blogs, including at LiveJournal.comand MySpace.com.

Child pornographers more 'mobile'

Unfortunately, they always seem to be a step ahead with the technology, so it's good for child advocates and caregivers to be aware of their tech exploits - not only for child-protection purposes, but also to see where tech in general is going. For one thing, child porn is becoming more mobile. "Handheld devices including cell phones, PDAs and portable MP3 players will increasingly be used to take and transfer images of child pornography," reports the Associated Press, citing a talk by Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Department's child exploitation unit at an international law-enforcement conference in Toronto. Parents, help your kids be alert to the downside of camera and video phones. Officer Gillespie told fellow police about "the arrest of a 36-year-old man last month for using a cell phone camera to take digital photographs under the skirts of young girls in [Toronto's] east end." [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this news out.]

Online music sales way up

In just one year, sales of downloaded music have more than tripled, the Associated Press reports. Digital music sales reached $790 million in the first half of this year, compared to $220 million for the first half of 2004. Even though the $790 million figure is just 6% of overall industry sales, it's "helping offset a continuing decline in CD sales and other physical formats," according to a report from the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "The digital boom, which now exceeds the value of the global singles market, was largely driven by sales in the top five markets - the US, Britain, Japan, Germany and France," according to the AP. For more on digital music, see "File-sharing realities for families."

School district's blogging alert

A school district in central Texas took matters in its own hands and sent parents a heads-up about blogging and social-networking sites like Xanga.com and MySpace.com. The Leander school district "sent letters to hundreds of middle and high school parents warning them that their children may be posting personal information and suggestive photos on the Internet," the Austin American-Statesman reports. "School officials said they became concerned when they saw 'inappropriate' material being posted on their students' blogs," including "personal attacks on other students and school staff members." When the American-Statesman was looking for sources for the article, several students declined because they didn't want their parents to know they blog. One agreed: 17-year-old Terra Pratt, who blogs and has her own Web site, the American-Statesman says, but she's smart. She "posts her photo but uses an alias so strangers cannot find her." Here are further insights from the Miami Herald into middle-schoolers' early entry into the adult world through blogging. And here's a teacher's view on teen blogs, featured in my 6/6/05 issue.