A mom sues RIAA back

Tanya Andersen, former target of a recording industry lawsuit for copyright theft via file-sharing, is suing back for malicious prosecution, ArsTechnica.com reports. Her suit, filed last week in a US District Court in Oregon, “accuses the RIAA of a number of misdeeds, including invasion of privacy, libel and slander, and deceptive business practices.” The RIAA’s case against her was dismissed earlier this month. Here, too, is a Wired blog post on the subject.

Teens' digital story

Amanda and Nick’s final project as high school seniors in the Chicago area this past spring was a digital storytelling assignment. They were asked to “tell a story in digital video about “what it meant to be an American and to tell the world about that. Move beyond the rhetoric, the politicians and the media. Speak as a kid. What do you have to say to the world?” writes their teacher and Instructional Technology Coordinator David Jakes. He also writes that he was blown away by what they came up with (you can play the piece right in his blog post at TechLearning.com): “So this is the kind of work kids can do. Given the opportunity, and with some guidance and hard work, they rise to the occasion. And when we hear about kids not caring, not wanting to do quality work, just look at this story, because it’s good. Very good. And when kids are characterized as lazy, and only concerned about their cell phone, mp3 player, or text messaging, just look at this story. This isn’t self-absorbed, it’s not spontaneous, it’s thoughtful and reflective. It’s what an 18 year old should be capable of, it’s what we should be teaching kids to do.”

China's videogame sweatshops

If someone at your house plays World of Warcraft and you want to understand the appeal or the ins and outs of this 8 million-player virtual world better, don’t miss “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” in the New York Times Magazine. It’s one of those stories that transports you almost to another planet, because it’s about China’s “gold farmers,” usually low-20-something professional gamers making sweatshop wages to do the tedious in-game work that gets their clients (gamers mostly in North American and Europe) into higher levels in the game by earning them “coins.” “Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.” But that’s only the beginning of the story.

Web video's dueling giants

Watch out, YouTube: Now there’s MySpace TV. Then again, watch out, MySpace: YouTube is adding social-networking features. MySpace Video is morphing into “an independent Web site (www.myspacetv.com) that people can visit to share and watch video, even if they have not signed up for MySpace,” the New York Times reports. And even though it will “offer some new ways for members of MySpace, which attracts 110 million users a month, to more easily integrate the videos they create and watch into their personal profiles,” the focus reportedly will be more on professionally produced video. “For example, last week MySpace became the exclusive site for Sony’s ‘Minisodes’ - five-minute versions of ‘80s sitcoms like ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ and ‘Silver Spoons’.” Meanwhile, the Times reports, YouTube is testing a new tool that allows “YouTube users to chat while they watch the same clip and share their favorite videos.” As for audiences, MySpace TV launches “in 15 countries and 7 languages, much like YouTube’s own foray into nine countries announced this month,” and YouTube says more than half its audience is now overseas.

96% social networking

That’s 96% of US teens and tweens, participating in a social-networking site at least once a week, according to a study by teen market researcher Alloy Media & Marketing. “Youngsters are now spending nearly as much time online as they are watching television, and many multitask,” Alloy found. “However, they’re four times more likely to be concentrating on what they’re doing online than on what’s happening on the television.” Parents may also be interested to know how these young social networkers respond to marketing, according to the survey. It needs to “enhance or facilitate their social-networking experience,” offer them tools for self-expression, e.g., widgets to enhance or customize blogs or profiles. As for the huge 96% figure, in her latest paper on the social Web, danah boyd suggests that the percentage of US teens who are “truly active” in social sites “is more like 50%” (see my feature next week for more from danah).

Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights

About a third (32%) of US online teens, or some 8 million kids, have been cyberbullied - girls more than boys (38% vs. 26%) and older girls more than younger ones (41% aged 15-17 vs. 34% aged 12-14). That’s according to a national survey the Pew Internet & American Life Project just released. Interestingly, despite all we hear about Internet-based harassment, the respondents told Pew they’re more likely to be bullied offline than online. More than two-thirds (67%) of the 12-to-17-year-olds Pew/Internet surveyed said that, while 29% said bullying happens more online, and 3% online and offline equally (I probably would’ve been among the 3% saying it was both), bullying and harassment happen more offline than online.

The study found that the online version of harassment, “depending on the circumstances,” can fall anywhere on the annoyance spectrum from “relatively benign” to “truly threatening.” Toward the more damaging end of this Richter scale are tactics like “receiving threatening messages, having private emails or text messages forwarded without [one’s] consent; having an embarrassing picture posted without [one’s] permission; or having rumors about them spread online.” The most common tactic experienced among the four Pew asked its respondents about was “someone taking a private email, IM, or text message you sent them and forwarding it to someone else or posting it where others could see it,” for example in a profile or blog.

Pew/Internet asked the teens why people bully online, and they gave four basic answers: that the Net is just another venue for a fact of adolescent life, the convenience and access technology provides, the anonymity of the Net that encourages bullying (psychologists call this “disinhibition”), and the intolerance that fuels bullying. In this digital age, study author Amanda Lenhart writes, “the impulses behind [bullying] are the same, but the effect is magnified.” We’re of course talking about sites with millions of members where the “publisher” loses control of the content the minute it’s “published,” which means the damage can be broader in scope and can last much longer (see social media researcher danah boyd’s view on this in the bullets below).

In addition to the phone survey, Pew/Internet conducted focus groups with teens. Parents might want to note one of the anecdotes shared by a 15-year-old boy in one of the groups: “I played a prank on someone but it wasn’t serious…. I told them I was going to come take them from their house and kill them and throw them in the woods. It’s the best prank because it’s like ‘oh my god, I’m calling the police’ and I was like ‘I’m just kidding, I was just messing with you.’ She got so scared though.” A 16-year-old New York boy was recently arrested and pleaded guilty for making a similar threat online concerning a teacher (see below).

One of the most important online safeguards for youth going forward is critical thinking – thinking through the implications of their actions online so they can avoid embarrassment, victimization, and even arrest for actions that never saw the light of day when we were kids!

Related links

What’s different online: In an interview with Alternet.org last winter, social media researcher danah boyd (who prefers her name lower-cased) explained what’s different about socializing (and bullying) online: “persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence - what you say sticks around. Searchability - my mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I'd gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn’t, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they've written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability - you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of ‘uh ohs’ when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In an unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you're saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we're dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can't tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.”

On disinhibition: “Social intelligence & youth”

Online threats: The New York teen who made threats against a teacher in a YouTube video.

The survey’s URL again: “Cyberbullying & Online Teens”

A sampler of the worldwide coverage of this study: NewKerala.com in India, The Times in the UK, ElectricNews.net in Ireland, and the AP at CNN in New York.

Video threats: Teen pleads guilty

This case might come in handy for parents looking for a way to get across that kids really can’t say anything they want to on the social and media-sharing Web. A 16-year-old in New York who was accused of threatening his math teacher in an online video “pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of aggravated harassment,” the Staten Island Advance reports. He was arrested in May for “asking in one of his YouTube.com video blogs that someone ‘put a bullet’ in the neck of his math teacher, who gave him a failing grade.” The Staten Island district attorney’s office said the boy would be sentenced in August to 15 days of community service and three years' probation.

Teen hacker arrested

A Belgian 17-year-old had some fun boasting that he’d hacked into the federal police Web site but the tables were turned when the police announced he’d been arrested within 24 hours of the hack. After succeeding in temporarily shutting down the police site, he left “a mocking online note which helped identify him,” Agence France Press reports. The boy was picked up after a search of his home in a Brussels suburb, then released the same evening. He’ll “later be summoned to appear in a minors court.”

Real charity in virtual world

The virtual world of Second Life has a population of about 7 million (one-third Americans), and the populace is about to be exposed to a discussion about philanthropy. The MacArthur Foundation has given the Center on Public Diplomacy of the University of Southern California $550,000 to stage events in Second Life, including discussions of how foundations can address issues like migration and education,” the New York Times reports. Nonprofit organizations are setting up shop in Second Life and staging fund-raising events. The American Cancer Society has “raised real money with virtual walkathons,” according to the Times – a few hundred avatars walked and raised $5,000 in 2005, and $82,000 has already been raised for this year’s walkathon, which hasn’t even started yet. I think there should be a similar discussion in Teen Second Life, where there would be an equally strong response, and wonder if YouthNoise.com has thought of this.

'Videogame addiction' update

The committee of the American Medical Association that proposed designating videogame addiction as a mental disorder like alcoholism “backed away from its position” even before debate on the subject began at the AMA’s annual meeting, Reuters reports. Instead, the committee “recommended that the American Psychiatric Association consider the change when it revises its next diagnostic manual in 5 years.” Reuters adds that later, during the debate, addiction experts “strongly opposed” such a designation. Listing “videogame addiction” as a mental disorder in the American Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders would “ease the path for insurance coverage of video game addiction.” Excessive use of videogames affects about 10% of players, according to Reuters. Here’s Gamasutra.com’s coverage.

Take Two game controversy

Take Two Interactive, creators of the Grand Theft Auto series of videogames, is embroiled in controversy again. It has suspended the release of its latest product, Manhunt 2, “because of a rating controversy in the United States and a ban in Britain and Ireland,” the Associated Press reports. The Entertainment Software Rating Board gave Manhunt 2 a preliminary rating of Adults Only, which can really put a damper on sales since stores like Wal-Mart won’t even put AO games on their shelves, and Nintendo and Sony “said their policies bar any content rated for adults only on their systems.” The game is about “the escape of an amnesiac scientist and a psychotic killer from an asylum and their subsequent killing spree,” the AP adds. “In the Wii version, the console's motion-sensitive remote is waved around to control a virtual murder weapon.” The game was supposed to be released in the US on July 10 for the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2 consoles. Meanwhile, Sony apologized to the Church of England for using one of its churches as a backdrop for one of its games, the Associated Press earlier reported.

Your house on a power diet

This isn't a kid-tech story so much as a family-tech one. But putting our homes on a strict "power diet" to save money and help the planet can offer quite a life-lesson to our kids. SafeKids.com's Larry Magid (who is also my co-director of BlogSafety.com) put his own house through the paces and wrote about it the New York Times. He walks you through what to do to reduce the energy pigginess of household computers, whether they’re PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops. Fortunately, tech companies are planning to do their part too. “A consortium of Intel, Google, PC makers and other technology companies [last] week announced their intent to increase the PC’s overall energy efficiency to 90%,” Larry reports.

Drug dealing on the social Web

For some time I’ve been writing and speaking about the other kind of support teens are finding on the Web, support for risky or self-destructive behavior – which long predates this latest, very social phase of online life. Now there’s some valuable research on this – a study of “more than 10 million online messages written by teens in the past year,” USATODAY reports. Conducted by Nielsen BuzzMetrics for The Caron Treatment Centers, a non-profit program in Pennsylvania, it found that teens “regularly chat [online] about drinking alcohol, smoking pot, partying, and hooking up.” Only about 2% of the messages in blogs, public chatrooms, message boards, and other online spaces, specifically mentioned drugs or alcohol, says USATODAY, but the article led with the experience of an 18-year-old, now in recovery, who “wrote freely [in her online journal] about her drug use,” and used the Net to contact her dealer and connect with people who had drugs. “Many of the teens who posted messages about drugs or alcohol often traded information about using illicit substances without getting hurt or caught. Some teens debated drug legalization and the drinking age. Other teens recounted their partying experiences, including sexual liaisons while drunk or high,” USATODAY says the study found.

Online parenting tools: Long list + context

Marking National Internet Safety Month**, Adam Thierer - parent, author, and online-safety public policy specialist – commented in his blog: “This remains one of the great mysteries of the parental controls debate: Why is it that so many parents say they want more and better controls, but when they are made available many of them choose not to use them?”

Adams says some people think it’s because the parental controls aren’t easy enough to use and others because they’re too basic. I hope it’s because parents instinctively know tech tools are no blanket solution. Different tools (Web filters, phone filters, IM monitoring, Net curfew software, etc.) can be useful at different times, but nothing ever replaces parenting, even though we’re figuring it out as we go along!

Adam just released a book - Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: a Survey of Tools & Methods - that provides a very comprehensive survey of what’s out there for us, but saying in his introduction something very similar to what I just said: “If there is one point I try to get across in my book, it is that regardless of how robust they might be today, parental control tools and rating systems are no substitute for education - of both children and parents.”

Related links

Controls in the OS. Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg recently reviewed parental controls at the operating system level in both PCs and Macs. For PCs, he looks at the fairly comprehensive controls in Microsoft’s new OS, Vista. For more on Vista controls, see this item in my 1/12/07 issue .

PointSmartClickSafe: The cable industry has partnered with a number of national nonprofit organizations to offer PointSmartClickSafe.org, an online-safety-ed resource for parents and kids. Here’s the press release. Here’s Adam Thierer’s commentary on the project. The cable industry’s trade association, which spearheaded the project, is the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

**The statistics in the Senate's resolution on National Internet Safety Month, which haven't been widely corroborated in the online-safety research community, shouldn't be the focus of this document. For data, check out the research at the Digital Media & Learning Project, Pew Internet & American Life Project,and the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire - or search for "research" or "study" in the 10-year-old NetFamilyNews archive (search box at the top of each page).

Job interviews in Second Life?!

Yes. Business suit not necessary, just send your avatar. The Wall Street Journal reports that a big recruitment-advertising firm hosted a job fair in the Second Life virtual world “with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sdexho Alliance SA” and there’ll be another one in August. it’s now possible to meet with recruiters without actually showing up for a job interview.” So a ZDNET blogger decided that, with “future job prospects in mind,” it might be prudent to revise some earlier statements about Second Life, for example, changing this comment… “Second Life has gone from zero to cliche in record time as people sit around admiring their avatars. The dirty little secret: It’s a productivity drain”… to this view: “Second Life is great. I love my avatar, which is some rabbit type thing if I recall. It’s a great productivity tool.” Not that I’m suggesting we parents need to do any backpedaling from comments about teen time spent in virtual worlds. But a little open-mindedness might not hurt.

US parents on kids' media: Study

Two-thirds of parents are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate content US children are exposed to, but they’re mostly talking about other people’s children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s just-released study, “Parents, Children & Media." Only 20% of parents say their own children are seeing a lot of inappropriate content. The study included a national survey of more than 1,000 parents of kids 2-17 and six focus groups with parents held around the US. In other findings, 65% of parents say they closely monitor their kids’ media use and only 18% say they should be monitoring more (16% say it’s not necessary to monitor their kids’ media use). Where the Internet’s concerned, about 75% of parents “check what Web sites their children have visited, and even more look at how kids are profiled on MySpace and who's on their Instant Message ‘buddy lists’,” USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study, which quotes lead Kaiser researcher Victoria Rideout as saying parents feel they’re getting on top of their kids’ Internet use (yet KNX Radio’s headlines was “Study Shows Many Parents are Clueless when it Comes to their Kids and the Internet”). Kaiser also found that 59% of parents say the Internet is “mainly a positive force in their children’s lives”; only 7% say it’s “mainly negative.” And 73% of parents say they “know a lot about what their kids are doing online,” Kaiser found.

Grooming case that ended in suicide

Most teenagers know they’re too smart to fall for the manipulations of online strangers young or old, but they’re not, is the message of parents Danielle and Robin Helms in Orange County, Calif. They say that because their 15-year-old daughter, Kristin, committed suicide after she and her parents “tried everything” to overcome her depression over the end of her mostly online “relationship” with a man who had groomed the girl online for over a year and convinced her they were in love. “She was a smart, well-adjusted kid who was close to her family,” the Los Angeles Time reports. “She got good grades, got to school on time, ran on the cross-country and track teams and was an artist whose talent landed her in advanced classes,” the Times reports. When they found out she was communicating with this man, her parents banned Net use for five months. But parents need to know that “even in the strictest of households, children can flout access rules by hopping on computers at schools, libraries, coffee shops and copy centers and by using gadgets as handy as their cellphones.” And that’s what Kristin did, she later told her parents. She kept in touch with her “friend” via email and phone outside her home. [See also “How to recognize grooming."]

Tragic teen grooming case

Most teenagers know they’re too smart to fall for the manipulations of online strangers young or old, but they’re not, is the message of parents Danielle and Robin Helms in Orange County, Calif. They say that because their 15-year-old daughter, Kristin, committed suicide after she and her parents “tried everything” to overcome her depression over the end of her mostly online “relationship” with a man who had groomed the girl online for over a year and convinced her they were in love. “She was a smart, well-adjusted kid who was close to her family,” the Los Angeles Time reports. “She got good grades, got to school on time, ran on the cross-country and track teams and was an artist whose talent landed her in advanced classes,” the Times reports. When they found out she was communicating with this man, her parents banned Net use for five months. But parents need to know that “even in the strictest of households, children can flout access rules by hopping on computers at schools, libraries, coffee shops and copy centers and by using gadgets as handy as their cellphones.” And that’s what Kristin did, she later told her parents. She kept in touch with her “friend” via email and phone outside her home. [See also “How to recognize grooming."]

Phone-sex number on game disk

A 12-year-old boy in Washington State got stuck in a particular level of the PlayStation 2 game Ratchet and Clank, so he called the tipline printed on the game disk and found he’d called a phone sex line, KNDO TV reports. “The number appears on multiple games, including top sellers like Hot Shots Golf, and a similar number on other games leads to the same service.” When the boy’s mom called Sony, the company said it hadn’t used that number for about two years and couldn’t be responsible for it.

Parent videogamers

I love the parenting message in this Associated Press story, and I think it applies to teen social networking as well as videogaming. Across the US, according to the AP, many parents say hanging out with their children in the virtual worlds of videogames brings kids closer “by providing a safe, convenient way to stay in touch and talk to their children on their own terms.” Eighty percent of the parents who play videogames (35% of US parents) play with their children, according to an Entertainment Software Association study cited by the AP. One dad said “the time spent with his daughter … matters much more than the games themselves,” and the AP cites an expert saying that “videogames equalize the physical size differences between fathers and their kids. That means children often have the edge in a video game, and they may feel more willing to communicate.” That’s something I’ve been suggesting since I started writing this newsletter – that empowering kids (letting them be, e.g., the family chief technology officer or just asking them to guide a parent through software preferences) fosters both communication and mutual respect, which is increasingly protective of online kids. It’s protective because on the 24/7 user-driven Web it’s so easy, when parent-child communication breaks down, for kids to operate at greater risk online “underground” where parents can’t be involved.

Peaceful videogames?!

Yup. The New York Times reports that the focus of videogame makers around the world is shifting away from “violent killer videogames” to the sort of game that promotes exercise, vocabulary-building, and nutrition. “The strategic shifts in the game industry come as critics and government authorities are growing impatient with violence in video games,” according to the Times. “The justice ministers of the European Union vowed last week to press for stricter regulations on the sale of ‘killer games’ to children.” Game manufacturers aren’t just responding to regulators, though, they’re trying to broaden their market, as Nintendo did by introducing the Wii console. Examples are Ubisoft’s My Life Coach with nutrition advice and Electronic Arts’s Sommelier wine guide for the DS and Boogie for the Wii, with which users “sing and dance along with cartoon characters,” the Times reports. Other even more high-minded examples are Food Force, developed by the UN Food Programme, and PeaceMaker about finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see “Gaming for peace!”).

Be smart about cybercafes

If your family is traveling this summer and wants to blog or check email in Internet cafes, you’ll need to be careful about logging into your Web accounts like Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail. Public computers can easily have malicious keylogger software on them that logs your every keystroke (such as passwords and other account info). The workaround is simple, though. Take a great tip the Washington Post’s Rob Pegararo picked up from the Lifehacker blog: “Type a character or two of a password, then click elsewhere in the browser [like the window where you type URLs or Web addresses] and type a random character or two before clicking back in the password field to type the next character, repeating this exercise until the entire password has been entered.” Only malicious software that actually tracks your cursor position would “know” which part of what you typed was junk and which characters were part of your password. “But,” Rob writes, “why would the hypothetical criminal bother going to that effort when enough other people will type in passwords without obscuring them?”

Global child-porn ring busted

An international pedophile network involving more than 700 suspects was investigated by police in 35 countries, the BBC reports, 200 of them in the UK. “The paedophile ring was run by [Briton] Timothy Cox, 27, who is due to be sentenced for child porn offences.” He ran a chat room, called “Kids the Light of Our Lives,” that was used to exchange pictures of child exploitation. Some 75,000 explicit images were found on Cox’s own computer, the BBC adds. “In total, 31 children were saved as a result of the investigation,” the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, which coordinated the international investigation, told the BBC.

Stalking: New fact of life?

“Stalking” isn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds. Say you’re single and someone lines up a blind date for you. You’d want to find out a little about him, right? So you “stalk him,” as the digital natives put it. To many social networkers, it’s a fun, innocuous sort of “background check,” to see who a person’s friends are, where her tastes lie, what she talks about, etc., and definitely what she looks like. Stalking has even become a bit of a cottage industry, the Associated Press reports (though I think the cottage industry is the more general “widgets” one, which includes all the little add-on enhancements that third-party companies are developing for the social-networking sites - see this item).

For example, 19-year-old Jared Kim, got the idea for Stalkerati.com at a backyard BBQ when his sister wanted to know who some guy was who had asked her out. Their geeky group of friends, who had all brought their laptops, “immediately turned to their keyboards to do a little cyberstalking,” according to the AP. So “Kim had a thought: Why not write a program that searches all the social-networking sites at once and creates a profile of the person you're searching for?” Kind of like the file a private investigator’s compiles for his client maybe? Within a month of the BBQ, Kim had put up the site, then word got out (in the blogosphere), and suddenly it had 10,000 visitors a day, the AP says (Kim also writes about this on his About page). Stalkerati was so much on the map, in fact, that MySpace noticed and blocked it as a security problem for its users (they had to give Stalkerati their MySpace passwords to use the info-gathering service). Facebook apparently allows it, but it’s my impression that this, social-networking, version of “stalking” was practically coined in Facebook. For more on this and online stalking's better-known darkside, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

FBI fights 'zombies'

The FBI says people have their cars inspected once a year, they should have their PCs inspected regularly too. It’s talking up the problem of “botnets,” or “zombie networks,” the Associated Press reports – networks of infected computers, very often family PCs, that are controlled by the malicious hackers who infected them. “Because the hacker has complete control of each ‘bot’ computer, the botnet can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks, send spam email, steal account login information or run any program.” The federal agency is publicizing some high-profile arrests it has made of botnet jocks, including one of the “world’s top spammers,” based in Seattle, who kept distributing spam even after Microsoft won a $7 million lawsuit against him in 2005, and a guy in Texas who infected “more than 10,000 computers globally, including two Chicago-area hospitals” (delaying medical sevices). People, keep those PCs patched and protected with firewalls and anti-virus software!

Cellphone safety

There are entertainment “thumb jocks” (videogamers) and then there are the communications ones, including cellphone texters at your house. Teens love texting, I think partly because of the extra privacy this silent form of communication affords them and partly because it can be 24x7 (see “Teen dating abuse”). They also love the growing number of features cellphones have, so they can snap and share photos, swap tunes and videos, customize with skins and ringtones, access social-networking profiles, and (with the GPS technology that new phones have) pinpoint their fellow texters’ physical locations - as well as text and talk with each other. More and more, reports Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com, a cellphone is “really a personal computer for your pocket with all the benefits and dangers of PCs.” Therein lies the heads-up for parents, and Larry – who is also publisher of SafeKids.com and my co-director at BlogSafety.com – offers, in this article, the full complement of parental considerations where young cellphone users are concerned, from costs to carriers to content.

TX arrests 7 social-networking sex offenders

With identity info provided by MySpace, Texas police have arrested seven sex offenders, the state’s attorney general announced Thursday. CNET reported that “the seven, whose profiles on MySpace had already been removed under an internal program to weed out sex offenders prowling the News Corp.-owned site, were arrested for breaking parole or probation rules.” Six were picked up because they had MySpace profiles and their parole requirements banned their Internet use.

Professional videogame league

Videogaming competition will soon be on DirecTV. There are six teams in the new Championship Gaming Series league, CNET reports: “the San Francisco OPTX, the Los Angeles Complexity, the Chicago Chimera, the Dallas Venom, the Carolina Core, and 3DNY from New York. Each team has a general manager and 10 players [or “thumb jockeys”].” You may have heard of some of the games they’ll play: Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive 4; Project Gotham Racing 3, and FIFA '07. And this is an international sport, of course. Besides DirecTV, the league is backed by “the UK's BSkyB and Asia's Star networks.”

AMA on 'game addiction'

The American Medical Association is looking into whether videogame play can become an “addiction.” The AMA has released “an extremely readable” but “cautious” report summarizing the current “state of knowledge” on the subject, ArsTechnica reports. “In terms of ‘gaming addiction,’ the report suggests that it is likely to be a subset of internet addiction, as it most frequently occurs in players of MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. In both of these addictions, the current definition is currently informal - the described symptoms actually most closely resemble pathological gambling, rather than an addiction. In either case, the report notes, ‘there is currently insufficient research to definitively conclude that video game overuse is an addiction’." ArsTechnica links to the report. (See also “Notable fresh videogame findings.”) Meanwhile, a Wired News blog reports that a new study entitled "Report of the Council on Science and Public Health: Emotional and Behavioral Effects, Including Addictive Potential, of Video Games," co-authored by Mohamed K. Khan, MD, Phd, is urging the AMA to recognize videogame addiction as a disorder. And Dow Jones reports that the AMA has taken steps in that direction.

Employers searching social sites

Just another bit of evidence that job recruiters are “stalking” too (see my feature this week) – using social sites to find out more about job candidates. Though it may take employers a little more work, they probably prefer free “background checks” to costly services. According to AllHeadlineNews.com, “Rob McGovern, CEO and chairman of online job site Jobfox, claims that recruiters are increasingly using content from social networking sites to get more information on job candidates.” Remind young job seekers in your family. But remember, too, what Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal suggests – that, as time goes on, more and more recruiters and employers are social networking themselves (see “Growing up in public”). BTW, here’s Business Week on the professional networking part of social networking.

Phone monitoring on steroids

It's a little chilling, but maybe some parents feel they need to go to these lengths to protect their cellphone-using chilling. I can see parents using a product like this openly as a tool for solving a cyberbullying problem that might include calls and text message to a child’s cellphone. It’s called Flexispy, and it’s downloadable monitoring software for cellphones. The Thailand-based company's tagline is "Protect Your Children. Catch Cheating Spouses." According to its press release, the software “has already been used successfully worldwide to bring to light to extramarital affairs, disloyal employee activities, and to protect children from predators and SMS [phone text] bullying. It "runs invisibly in the background and can only be accessed using a secret code." Flexispy Light "automatically records all incoming & outgoing SMS messages, calls, emails and tracks the device location" and uploads all this to a Web site the "spy" can access. The "pro" version does all that and offers "the ability to secretly switch the phone’s microphone on from any other phone; thereby listening into the target’s surroundings."

Outfitting their penguins

Some kids and tweens are obsessed with the virtual care, feeding, outfitting of their penguins, Webkinz, Neopets, etc. – not to mention furnishing their igloos and other spaces. In many cases, kids just have to amass points by playing lots of games in these sites, in which case the “cost” is screen time, a lack of healthy, active outdoor time, and something marketers aim for: serious brand loyalty (e.g. from playing games sponsored by cereal companies and driving virtual cars placed by automotive sponsors). Common Sense Media recently ran a commentary for parents with tips on how to turn these online activities into “value-able” discussions about how to be wise spenders (and savers).

Online spin control

There’s an interesting ongoing debate on news sites around the Web about what the digital natives are doing to their reputations and future job prospects with all this public blogging and social networking. At first glance I thought this USATODAY column was just another commentary about how doomed teen social networkers’ reputations are. Then I got to the part with some good advice (maybe I’m just biased because it’s like what I’ve been saying). USATODAY’s Andrew Kantor writes, “It pays to go on the offensive and take some control over what people see about you online.” Toward the end he concludes that “if you're a small business [sub in “a person”], even if you don't need a website, you need a website. Otherwise your reputation is completely in the hands of anyone who wants to write about you online, good or bad. When a comment about you on a small blog is the first thing people see when they search for you, you need to spend some time on your cred.” Tell this to your kids and have them read “Overexposed teen,” a compelling example. Kantor’s bottom line: “Businesses and individuals need to be proactive when it comes to their reputations.” See also a commentary from the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Fry, linked to in “Growing up in public," looking at whether today’s online youth really will “pay the price for youthful indiscretions.”

Bullying made easy

University of Michigan student Emmarie spent “countless hours” as a teenager “justifying [her] online journal to her parents,” she writes in her university’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. They didn’t understand why she wanted to make her private thoughts so public, but she said it made her “feel connected knowing that someone knew my exact mood at that moment … and my side of the latest gossip.” But then the gossip turned against her. “By giving adolescents the opportunity to voice their opinions in public - an opportunity once reserved for the supposedly more responsible members of the media - the Internet has allowed them to elevate high school drama to a tabloid-like level of sophistication,” writes Emmarie, who is the paper’s associate editorial page writer this summer. “Worse still,” she adds, “there's a degree of suspended reality involved in Internet communication. Without face-to-face interaction, we can't actually experience the consequences of our words, making it easy to hurt others without a second thought.” You may be interested in her conclusion.

'Growing up in public'

Interest in youth’s limited interest in privacy (except where parents are concerned) is growing, and commentaries are multiplying. “The future belongs to the uninhibited,” suggested New York magazine (see this in NetFamilyNews). Across the pond, The Telegraph reported that, for today’s online youth, closeness, intimacy, the sharing of secrets is distributed rather than individual and private (see “Distributed friendship”). This week, the Wall Street Journal weighed in: Columnist Jason Fry wrote that “the conventional wisdom is that as those who grew up with the Net get older, they'll pay the price for their youthful indiscretions - starting when they're trying to get that first job and get Googled by the HR guy. And it'll get worse from there….” But that “wisdom,” the Journal goes on to suggest, is static. Things change. It won’t be long before “the HR guy” himself is a long-time MySpace or Facebook user who was pretty public about his social life. The future HR person will have “an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it,” Jason concludes, quite logically (and maybe comfortingly for parents of social networkers).

Parenting with profiles?

I co-wrote a book for parents that includes instructions on how to create a MySpace profile. I’ve often suggested to parents that they create their own profiles so they can monitor their kids’ social-networking activities. But I have no illusions that this is the solution for every household with teenagers. Fellow mom Michelle Slatalla’s fun-to-read account in the New York Times of where creating her own Facebook profile got her definitely confirms that I should have no illusions that this is every parent’s online-safety solution. But it also confirms my growing conviction that – just as their social-networking experiences are just an extension of teens’ offline social lives – so does a parent and child’s online relating mirror their experience in real life. (Don’t miss Michelle’s account of her exchange with the Facebook spokesperson on p. 2 of her article.)

Hanging out with Sprite?

I’m not sure how well social-networking services created by advertisers purely for marketing purposes go over with teenagers (Wal-Mart tried one and quickly abandoned the project, and Anheuser-Busch’s BudTV failed). But Coca-Cola has created one called Sprite Yard, the New York Times reports. It’s a social site for cellphones. “Consumers will be able to set up personal profiles, share photos and chat online with friends, all using cellphones rather than computer screens. People will type in codes from Sprite bottle caps to redeem original content, like ring tones and short video clips called mobisodes.” Of course, Sprite Yard launched in Asia (China), because that’s where *everybody* has a mobile phone, but it has global ambitions. But watch out, Coke, MySpace is mobile, and Facebook plans to launch a mobile version, so….

Real-time (very) mobile dating

For some singles, apparently, going to a Web site and emailing back and forth before actually meeting someone is way too cumbersome. With the MeetMoi cellphone service, one can receive a potential date’s profile (that of a person who’s selected by MeetMoi for his/her physical proximity) via text message and set up an encounter minutes away. The Wall Street Journal calls this “instant Internet dating,” which can update you on nearby prospects as you move around. Zogo’s another such service, and the giant Web-based Match.com is adding this mobile capability to its service. Another example, Fast Flirting, “allows users to sign into a virtual ‘lobby’ where they can select a flirting partner based on factors such as age and location” for $3 a month. It’s new but there’s a market, the Journal says - 3.6 million US cellphone users having “accessed a dating service from their mobile phone in March.” But for it to really take off, of course, the market will also need to feel safe. There are safety mechanisms in place on many services (e.g., MeetMoi shares profiles without revealing actual location – users do that) but, if teens are using them, parents might want to ask if they’ve tried such services and are taking advantage of safety features.

Social Web exploding in China

Watch out, YouTube, here come KU6.com. Well, YouTube probably doesn’t have to worry too much, but baby video-sharing site, based in Beijing, is the 46th most popular site in China, one of the world’s most populous countries, and says it broke even in three months, “attracted 2 million unique users a day in the last week of May … and unique users have been growing by 200,000 a day on average per week,” CNET reports (not sure is that growth is per day or per week, but…). KU6 also just struck a 2-year partnership with Baidu, which controls 70% of China’s search market, CNET adds. All this is in a story about how Web 2.0 – the very social, media-sharing, youth-driven Web – has totally taken off in China. And I’m telling you this because if any parent thought this is just another passing phase of the Net, that there are only a handful of sites or technologies kids use for online socializing, or that this is something a single government can regulate, here’s yet more evidence that none of the above is true.

Catching online parole violations

States are now catching violations of convicts on parole with the information MySpace is supplying attorneys general. USATODAY reports that “many convicted sex offenders who had profiles on the popular MySpace website are on parole, and some may be sent back to prison for emailing minors.” Connecticut’s attorney general told USATODAY that “more than half of the 210 sex offenders from his state who used the social networking site are on parole. One was returned to state custody last week for using the Internet, a violation of a condition of his release.” MySpace has been lobbying for federal legislation requiring convicted sex offenders to register their email addresses and other online contact data (not just street addresses and phone numbers); such legislation, which also attaches penalties for failure to comply, is now working its way through the US Congress.

Virtual money to real income

If people doubted – or never thought about - the real-world value of virtual economies (their children probably didn’t), the BBC has challenged any skepticism. “The possibility of making real money from virtual creations is the subject of the latest episode of the BBC show The Money Programme,” CNET reports. The show, which aired last Friday and was broadcast on both regular and virtual TV (the latter in the virtual world Second Life), explored the various ways real money is made in online worlds such as Lord of the Rings Online and Second Life, where “$600,000 changes hands every day,” according to CNET. “Some people, for example, hold down virtual jobs on the site while others sell unique clothing styles [for avatars in these worlds].” Others buy and sell artifacts (such as weapons in World of Warcraft) and advertising. “One Second Life virtual-real-estate agent recently claimed to have become the game's first real-life millionaire.”

MySpace seeks court's guidance

Sometimes states ask MySpace to turn over sex offenders’ email addresses, sometimes the content of their emails. Addresses are one thing, but the content of private emails seem to be another. “MySpace has provided the profiles of offenders,” Reuters reports. “However, MySpace has not provided private email correspondence, citing legal restrictions.” Federal law (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986) “prevents Internet service providers such as MySpace from turning over a user's electronic communications without a search warrant.” Another problem Reuters cites is the difficulty of obtaining a search warrant for an offender not currently under investigation. The upshot of all this is that MySpace filed a request in a Pennsylvania court that is seeking its guidance on how the site “can legally provide local authorities with the private emails of convicted sex offenders on it.” MySpace handed the emails over to the court so it could decide whether or not to share them with law enforcement. What the court decides “is seen as a test case for how local US authorities and MySpace can cooperate in sharing information without violating federal law.” Here’s CNET’s coverage.

Downturn in P2P downloads

Illegal file-sharing by US youth has dropped sharply in the past few years, a new study sponsored by the Business Software Alliance has found – though music remains the biggest reasons for P2P file-sharing. The percentage of US 8-to-18-year-olds “who acknowledged illegal downloads of software, music, movies or games fell from 60% in 2004 to 36% in 2007, Australian IT reports. Last year it was 43%. The reasons? Accidentally downloading a virus (62%), getting into legal trouble (52%), downloading spyware (51%), and getting into trouble with one’s parents (48%). “The survey found 66% of young people said their parents set rules on what they could do on the Internet.” Another study, by NPD Group, found that “unauthorized sharing of digital music remains a huge issue for the global music business,” but maybe now not so much from file-sharing as from CD-burning, ArsTechnica.com reports. Then you read headlines like: “P2P breaking Internode’s bank” about how the Adelaide ISP is struggling to keep up with file-sharing customers’ demand for bandwidth (in Australian IT).

Net hurts porn industry

This might be a surprise to some, possibly because of all that we hear in the news media about porn on the Net. And that’s exactly why. “The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers,” the New York Times. Porn customers apparently don’t care that much about brand-name material. It’s a $13 billion industry that has experienced “years of steady increases,” the Times reports. But sales and rentals of, for example porn videos were $3.62 billion last year, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, it adds. What this spells, the article indicates, is more “teaser porn” on the Web – free, short promo videos trying to lure people into buying.

Flak from LiveJournal's mass deletion

After deleting some 500 online journals in an effort to remove pedophilia from its site, LiveJournal apologized and restored a number of journals that were in some cases explicit but not illegal. The company’s CEO apologized for going to extremes and reinstated some of the journals. CNET’s report is indicative of some of the more risqué content on the social Web: “The mass reinstatement means that the deleted science fiction and fantasy ‘fandom’ groups - many of which boast sexually explicit fiction written by fans about characters such as those from the Harry Potter or Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes - began reappearing [last] Thursday. One Harry Potter-themed group called pornish_pixies celebrated its return by posting an erotic story of a teenage Harry having intimate relations with arch-nemesis Draco Malfoy. One restored group deals with fictional tales of incest. Another, called lol_porn, includes links to bloopers and other unintentionally amusing pornographic Web sites.” CNET adds that “what outraged the LiveJournal protesters … is that the censored discussions and accounts went far beyond what they believe was necessary to target pedophilia.” See also earlier NFN items on "chanslash" and “yaoi."]

Extreme cyberbullying: 2 cases

By “extreme,” I mean bullying that has led to teen suicide attempts. Two such cases involving three New Zealand girls have come to my attention in the past week – one through our BlogSafety forum and the other covered in that country’s national news media.

The Sunday News in NZ reported this week that two 15-year-old secondary-school students were tricked by another girl into believing two teenage boys whose online profiles she’d created with scanned photos of magazine models had become their online boyfriends. The scam was discovered by the mother of one of the victims, according to the Sunday News, when she “found a scalpel under her daughter's mattress and an email on the teen's computer from her ‘boyfriend,’ instructing her how to kill herself.” When the mother called the imaginary boyfriend’s cellphone number, she found it belonged to the bully’s mother. The girl had conducted these online “relationships” with her victims for 10 months, the Sunday News reports, even going so far as to send both victims a number of gifts from the “boyfriends,” “including flowers, teddy bears and T-shirts.” This peer-to-peer grooming process culminated in an unfulfilled suicide pact between the two victims, the Sunday News.

My awareness of the second case started with this post in the forum: “Four weeks ago, my daughter, in a weak moment, attempted suicide because she was grieving a boy that she had met and communicated with” online and via phone texting. The mother, Karen, later emailed me a copy of her full story, detailed in a letter to New Zealand’s Health Ministry (published here, with her permission). The “boy,” she wrote, was - as in the Sunday News case – imaginary, the creation of another teenage girl, who enlisted the help of another friend to create the profile of this imaginary surfer sponsored by Rip Curl and named “Ben.”

I had read many posts about imposter profiles created about real people; this was the first I’d heard of profiles created about fake people – yet another kind of cyberbullying.

But that’s not the worst of the story. Before this experience, Karen wrote, three young people in their small community had been lost to car accidents and suicide, one a friend of the family. Then this past January “Ben” committed suicide while texting her daughter, Karen wrote. “Sophie [who believed he was a real person] was obviously desperate and was furiously trying to call him and text him, telling him not to do it … to no avail…. On asking Sophie more about this boy, she proceeded to tell me that he had suffered from depression, partly because he had witnessed a previous girlfriend hang herself, and that [another girl] had swallowed razor blades a few months before…. This was Sophie’s reality.” I’ll leave the full story to Karen.

If you're interested in my own take-aways from these cyberbullying cases, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Net-safety perspective

This Charlotte Observer columnist makes a darn sensible point. He points to a “National Survey of Children’s Health” by University of Michigan’s Children’s Hospital finding that Internet safety was ranked as the No. 7 children’s health problem by the US public (smoking, drugs, and obesity top the list). What’s interesting, he writes, is that “suicide, depression and cancer didn't make the top 10,” even though “suicide was the third leading cause of death for children aged 10 to 19 in 2004 … cancer is the leading cause of death by disease among children 1 to 14 years old … and “about half of the estimated 19 million new sexually transmitted disease cases occur in people under 25,” he cites research as showing. He concludes with something we and our kids do need to think about where Net safety’s concerned: “Kids think the Internet is a great way to meet people. It is a great way to meet people. It's also a horrible way to meet people. You can't see them. You can't look in their eyes, read their body language or ask for ID. There are no witnesses…. We've done a poor job educating our kids about online safety in general. But put it in its place. Computers you can turn off. Cancer, depression and AIDS you cannot.” Balanced reporting seems to be a trend. Here’s the Contra Costa Times on how the Internet is “safer than it seems."

New field: Social computing

It’s a good thing University of Michigan now has a graduate program in social computing. “After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Programs like this, it adds, tend to draw students with psychology, sociology, and communications degrees as much as from computer science. Another example: a communications professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology receiving a grant last month for “nearly $150,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop a course in social media.” This may spell future help with problems like cyberbullying that are about human sociology and communications, not computer science.