Conficker worm help (aka April Fool's worm)

It has been all over the news today, so a quick summary on what to do if you're concerned about family computers getting infected: You can see if your computers are ok by checking if they have MS08-067 installed. How? The exact steps depend on what version of Windows is on the particular PC, but they go pretty much like this: Go to Start > Control Panel > Programs > View installed updates. If you see among them "Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB958644)," your machine's all set. That update was issued last October, so if your family's doing automatic security updates, everybody's fine. If you don't see that update in the list, go to Microsoft.com, search for the MS08-067 security update, and install it. Here's CNET's live blog on the Conficker worm, TrendMicro's guide, Symantec's guide, and ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid talking about it on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Major update on Net predators: CACRC study

As scary as some of the reports covering it may make it look, there's a lot of good news for online youth in the much-anticipated new study from UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "Trends in Arrests of Online Predators." I hope the news coverage doesn't focus solely on the nearly five-fold increase in online predator arrests since the CACRC's last such study in 2000, but even if it does, that finding points to great preventive police work throughout the US (in 2006, 87% of those arrests involved police posing as teens, not real young people, the study found). Those arrests likely prevented crimes against children, and they're sending the message that cops are out there patrolling "the neighborhood."

But there's a lot of other positive news in the report. For example...

Between the CACRC's last study of Net-related predation arrests and this one, there was only a "modest" increase - 21% - of arrests of offenders soliciting young people, its authors report, "from an estimated 508 arrests in 2000 to an estimated 615 in 2006," at a time when the number of US 12-to-17-year-olds online went from 73% to 93%, or more than 25 million, in 2006, and when their Internet use was getting a lot more social.

Overall sex offenses against youth declined during this period, and Internet-initiated child sexual exploitation constituted only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation.

Despite all the hype about registered sex offenders, only a tiny percentage of the arrests surveyed were of registered sex offenders, which indicates that, while blocking them from sites may reduce, it by no means stops sexual solicitation (and we already knew that a significant percentage of the solicitations come from peers).

Not good news, but a notable finding in the study is that there has been "a significant increase in arrests of young adult offenders, ages 18 to 25," which also challenges the image of "predators" presented in the news media.

What about social networking?

Now let's zoom in on what the authors say about online social networking - not just because it's so important to our kids (and statistically of growing use to us too), but also because of all the hype and news coverage about predators in social network sites since 2005:

"There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.

"The nature of crimes in which online predators used the Internet to meet and victimize youth changed little between 2000 and 2006, despite the advent of social networking sites."

Going even further, USATODAY later cited the view of study lead author David Finkelhor that "ongoing studies show that being on a social networking site doesn't create risk for sexual victimization."

Where the risk is

The key to cutting through all the hype and really protecting kids from online predators is in understanding where the risk really lies. Since social networking hit the public radar screen in late 2005, the misconception has grown that the problem lies in a particular technology or "place" online. Dr. Finkelhor put it this way in an email the day the study was released: "The SNS [social-network sites] issue like the age authentication solution is all about mistaking the problem as one of 'access'," he told me. "It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online: behaviors."

As for what those behaviors are, Dr. Finkelhor spelled some of them out in a CBS/CNET interview for Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director: talking about sex with strangers in a lot of different places online, especially chatrooms about sex and romance, and getting into sexual relationships with people met online (see also "Profile of a teen online victim" from a talk Finkelhor gave in 2007).

"I think the messages [about online safety] need to warn kids about the very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivete and interest in exploring the world," he told Larry. Finkelhor added a risk-prevention behavior that both the Internet industry and all child safety advocates can help promote: "We also need to encourage other people online, the bystanders, people who know these young people or see these interactions on various sites, to report it, to caution the kids about what they're doing, to intervene, to begin to feel they need to take some action to short-circuit what they're seeing might happen." Watching each other's backs, I'm hearing Finkelhor suggest. One of the country's top experts on online safety is pointing to the need to foster digital citizenship.

Related links

"Social norming for risk prevention"

MySpace's PR problem

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

Teen sexting prosecutions: Negative reactions

A federal judge has barred a Pennsylvania prosecutor from filing child pornography charges against three teenage girls in a sexting case. "US District Judge James Munley said he was issuing a restraining order on Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick because his proposed action would violate freedom of speech and parental rights," Reuters reports. The ruling came after the ACLU last week said it would sue District Attorney Skumanick for his approach to child-pornography law (see my item on this). Also last week, Maureen Kanka, "the mother of the New Jersey girl whose death inspired Megan's Law," criticized "prosecutors who charge teenagers with child porn for distributing nude photos of themselves," the Associated Press reported. Apparently she was referring to a New Jersey case in which a 14-year-old girl was charged with distributing child pornography for posting nude photos of herself on MySpace. Kanka said the prosecutors "are harming the children more than helping them."

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 6: Old-fashioned pretend play in a new-fangled world

by Sharon Duke Estroff

During my time on Club Penguin, I became a regular at the local pizzeria. I liked it because of the cliché Italian piano music, the cozy candle-lit tables, and the fiery brick oven; but mostly because of the friendly waiters and waitresses who never, ever delivered my pizza.

Sure, I was initially stumped over how I could have given my order to 16 separate penguins and not have as much as a slice to show for it, but then I realized that these avatars/kids were only pretending to be waiters and waitresses. And they thought I was pretending to be a customer. We were playing the old "let's pretend" game in a new sort of setting.

Mom Break: Charming? Yes. Strictly worry-free? No. After all, it may walk like a penguin and talk like a penguin, but that doesn’t mean it's a penguin. Unlike traditional imaginative play, kids didn’t dream up this bustling restaurant scene on Club Penguin; graphic designers did it for them. The storylines were fueled not by children’s imaginations but by the robotic clicks of a computer mouse.

I’ve learned during my years of studying child psychology that childhood is a learning process by design, and old-fashioned pretend play is an essential, integral part of the curriculum. Dress-up games and tea parties aren’t just remnants of the retro-childhood, they're the building blocks of imagination and the means by which children weave together all the elements of life as they experience it. As traditional low-tech playtime progressively gives way to high-tech virtual playtime, the concern over its impact on millennial children is real and far-reaching. It's up to us millennial parents to maintain a consistent balance for our kids between real and virtual fun.

That said, I want to end this one on a positive note: Unlike the cyberbullying and romancing I describe in earlier Undercover Mom installments, I ultimately found the pretend play in the pizzeria to be more refreshing than concerning. You see, while those cyber-waiters and -waitresses might not have delivered my pizza, they served up something far more delicious to me: precious glimmers of hope that in every age and every generation, in this world and the virtual one, childhood will prevail.

Note from editor Anne Collier: Here are views from another respected source, Izzy Neis, a long-time moderator of kids' virtual worlds and online communities....

How children use (and implement) their imaginations in ClubPenguin

How young CP users' own seemingly impossible idea - actually tipping the iceberg - compares to Izzy's amazing experience of children's imaginative play and storyline creation on the beach

A conclusion Izzy posted last spring: "Basically, kids want to be included in the magic, they want to build empires from scratch, they want to emotionally invest themselves in seemingly-silliness, etc. It’s fun. It’s a release. It’s escapism – all the while feeling included and excited. I see this play pattern/behavior all the time on Club Penguin. From 'snowball' wars ... to parties in the igloo (much more fun in theory and planning and rounding up than the actual dancing part). Club Penguin provides tools… triggers… that allow the users to 'go to town' - making up their own rules & play. Club Penguin tries to support by facilitating pieces of storyline - just enough of a taste that the users will run away with the end."

Here's an index to all issues of Undercover Mom to date.

Self-injurers on the social Web

Here's one example of the opportunities for social-Web safety as our field emerges from predator panic to focus on research-based strategies: how to help self-injuring teens. I was prompted to write about this by an article headlined "Self-injury on the rise among young people" in the Los Angeles Times. Cutting and embedding (embedding objects like paper clips or staples for recurring self-harm) is usually secretive behavior by someone seeking relief from more extreme emotional pain, experts say. It's less secret now, however, thanks to the social Web. Teens sometimes post images of scarred arms and other forms of self-harm in their profiles, which can be a step toward getting help.

Because the social or participatory Web is by definition user-driven, helping self-injuring teens isn't a top-down control proposition for social-networking sites any more than it is for self-injurers' friends and relatives (kids sensing efforts to control or stop them can just go to other, lesser-known sites, where help may be less available). There's no question public awareness of self-harm needs to be raised using all media available, and this is one thing the social-Web industry's marketing resources can help with. But this issue also cries out for the kind of help social-Web users can offer best: social-norming. Peers have a great deal of influence, for good and bad, and the social-networking industry (as well as parents and educators) can promote positive peer influencing or social norming. Through education, we can all enlist the help of our young people's peers as part of the healing process, knowing that, generally, they're the only ones who know what's happening where individual cases are concerned.

It's a "remarkably prevalent," underreported behavior, the L.A. Times cites researchers in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (especially the 2/08 issue) as saying, "15-22% of all adolescents and young adults [having] intentionally injured themselves at least once in their lifetimes. One study of 94 girls, ages 10 to 14, found that 56% had hurt themselves at least once." It's important to know that there's a broad range of severity in self-harm. "Most self-injuries are not serious, and some people try it once and never again.... A small group self-injures to seek attention or as a cry for help. Another group self-injures excessively and is at high risk for suicide," the Times reports.

Both the Times and Canada's CBC tell of a Columbus, Ohio, radiologist, William Shiels, who uses ultra sound to find embedded objects and developed "a minimally invasive surgical technique to remove them," the CBC reported. Dr. Shiels recently reported at a medical conference that 9 of the 10 girls aged 15-18 in the study he presented "said they'd had thoughts of suicide or had attempted suicide previously"; 40% were victims of sexual abuse. "The high rates found among young people [as opposed to adults] seem to go hand in hand with other studies suggesting today's youth may suffer from more mental health problems than previous generations," the Times adds.

So back to where the social Web comes in. Beyond awareness-raising, how can the social-Web industry help this group - actually all groups - of at-risk teens? It can help bring psychological and risk-prevention expertise into the public discussions and conferences about online safety as well as into business practices, for example, in having such expertise available on-call to customer-support departments. To summarize, I suggest social Web sites consider...

Raising awareness with apps and widgets, house ads, and any other advertising tools available, sending the message to users that everyone deserves help, and helping those in trouble - not standing by passively or, much worse, gossiping - is what friends do!

Monitoring site activity for self-destructive behavior to whatever extent possible and at the very least...

Providing a number to call. Have the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and psychiatric health-care advice at the fingertips of customer-service staff 24/7 to share with any user who points out a need.

Prominently displaying the number and Web address of the Lifeline on at least the safety pages if not every page of their Web sites. [The Lifeline coordinates the work of more than 100 hotlines nationwide that deal with everything from suicidal thoughts to domestic violence to depression 24 hours a day for free (for more on this, see "The social Web's lifeline," 3/07).]

Related links

"Self-injury 'support' online"

"1 in 6 self-injure"

Even as early as 2006, when social networking was a new concept to most adults, MySpace was one of the biggest sources of referrals to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline; that's when I first blogged about the Lifeline. I'll be getting a thorough update on their work at a SAMHSA conference in DC in May.

ACLU sues prosecutor in sexting case

In a federal lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Pennsylvania district attorney who has "threatened to charge [three] girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves," Wired reports. "The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute the minors 'is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head'." Wired adds that District Attorney George Skumanick is running for re-election in May. This is the worst-case scenario that parents and teens need to be aware of: a zealous prosecutor and minors with no criminal intent (or even awareness that their behavior was illegal). A New York Times blogger painted the legal picture pretty graphically today, showing how laws written to protect children have not caught up with "the dicey mix of teenagers’ age-old sexual curiosity, notoriously bad judgment and modern love of electronic sharing." I do believe, though, that merely sharing this story with young people at your house or school is all the education most of them need to avoid sexting. A few more details on Skumanick's approach: Wired blogger Kim Zetter reports that "in a meeting with the students and their parents, he said he would file felony charges against the students unless they agreed to six months of probation, among other terms. He gave the parents 48 hours to agree. The parents of the three girls in the ACLU suit refused to sign. Skumanick then threatened to charge the girls with producing child porn unless their parents agreed to the probation, and sent the teenagers to a five-week, 10-hour education program to discuss why what they did was wrong and what it means to be a girl in today's society." [See also our sexting prevention tips at ConnectSafely.org, and this from my co-director Larry Magid about the need for calm discussion.]

A great teen-adult conversation to join

I've just joined the Focus on Digital Media community and hope you will too. This three-week-long online conversation starts April 13 (but you can register now here) and is the "first-ever among parents, educators, and teens about ethical questions in digital life ... questions like, "Should parents and teacher ‘friend’ their kids on Facebook?" It's a joint project of New York-based Global Kids, a nonprofit urban youth educational organization; San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media; and the Harvard Graduate School of Education's GoodPlay Project, exploring how youth view and practice ethics and citizenship in social media. This is a key question for everybody's online well-being going forward, I think, and young people involved in this exploration are doing pioneering work. I want to see what they think about the idea that civility, ethics, and new media literacy bridge the participation gap by fostering participants' physical, psychological, and reputational safety (see this on Henry Jenkins's 2006 white paper on the participation gap and this more recent post on social media literacy.

Sexting overblown? Yes and *no*

Not having heard the term "sexting" before the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed her, one 17-year-old referred to the practice of sending nude images of one's self or peers on phones as "lame" and plain-old drama creation. Her comment "echoes a view shared by sexual-health educators, teen advocates and academics gathering in San Francisco [last] week for Sex Tech, a conference that promotes sexual health among youth through technology. They believe that the sexting 'trend' is a cultural fascination du jour and is way overblown," the Chronicle reports. But, they indicate, it's also a very risky way to act out normative sexual curiosity (if that's what's involved and not peer pressure or bullying).

Where minors are concerned, sexting is definitely not overblown. Besides the psychological consequences of teens having intimate photos of themselves sent or posted anywhere, anytime, in perpetuity, the practice is illegal. Under current child pornography laws, taking, sending, and receiving nude photos of minors is production, distribution, and possession of child pornography. Right now these laws are extremely black-and-white and don't distinguish between sexting and "traditional" child porn trafficking. The piece in the UK's Daily Mail I blogged about last week suggests that sexting is becoming a social norm, and a recent survey said a third of young adults and 20% of teens had posted nude or semi-nude photos or video of themselves (which also means 80% haven't, sex educators pointed out in the Chronicle). The 20% figure seems high, but even if sexting is becoming normative, the bottom line is: the law hasn't caught up with the norm and - as long as bullying is, if not a norm, a reality of adolescent life - where teens are involved, concern about sexting is justified! They need to be educated about both the legal and psychological consequences (see also "The Net effect"). My hope is that law enforcement people called in by schools to deal with these cases will treat them as "teachable moments" and play an educational role - not send these cases to prosecutors. [Last week I blogged about a wise district attorney who does not want them to reach his desk.]

Stings still working, ICACs overworked

It was a question always in the back of the minds who follow online safety: what with all the sting operations run by Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces around the country (and so visibly for so many "predator" shows by Dateline NBC), don't those predators get more cautious about making "dates" with fictitious 14-year-olds? Of course they don't know at the time that the "teens" they talk with are really law enforcement people well-trained in, but wouldn't they get some clues or get cautious and stop getting "stung" so easily? Answer: Apparently not, which says something about what a sickness pedophilia is. "Despite the publicity then and now, the bad guys haven't gone away. They've quietly multiplied. Trading child porn online and grooming underage targets in chat rooms has exploded nationwide," reports the Associated Press in an in-depth look at the subject, both big-picture and a specific case. The AP adds that - in Wisconsin, anyway - their arrests have more than quadrupled in the past 10 years. See also "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context."

'Kids being raised in captivity': UK's Byron

This may sound about right on this side of the Atlantic too: UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron - prime minister-appointed author of the 2008 Byron Review of child safety on the Web and in videogames - told an audience that their risk-averse society was keeping children cooped up at home on a "global playground" called the Internet, where they can be at greater risk than if allowed out more, The Telegraph reports. Speaking at the annual gathering of Britain's Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, "the industry body that regulates sexual content in publications for young people," Byron suggested that adults need not only to understand the potential risks but the nature of the playground itself, how - if parts of it have curfews or are deemed off-limits to youth - they can simply move on to more risky areas. "Professor Byron said that many adults had responded to her review by suggesting that the Internet should be shut down completely, or that a 'watershed' must be imposed so that children cannot access it after 9pm - showing their failure to understand it.... Instead, she said parents and teachers ... should learn more about what young people are doing online." [For related links, here's video of her speaking - as a parent, psychologist, and researcher - at the Oxford Internet Institute, "Beyond Byron: Towards a New Culture of Responsibility" (I found it fascinating to hear her talk about her Byron Review development process, working through all the various perspectives); coverage in The Guardian of another talk, at a conference held by UK regulator Ofcom, where Byron cautioned against overregulating the Internet; and the Byron Review's own Web site and my coverage upon its release.]

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 5: Cold shoulders

By Sharon Duke Estroff

I’m not even a week into my undercover expedition and I’m already racking up penguin pals like Pokemon cards. No wonder Club Penguin's signature tagline is "Waddle around and make new friends"! That said, not all the birds I’ve met in this hopping virtual world are amicable types. Here’s what happened when I (ChillyLily) approached a group of cheery looking penguins dancing outside the lighthouse:

Me: Hi I am ChillyLily and I am KEWL

Dancing Penguin 1: R not

Me: Hannah Montana Rules

Dancing Penguin 2: Weirdo

Dancing Penguin 3: We r going to a members only party

Me: Can I come?

Dancing Penguin 1: Ewww no!

Me: PLZ

Dancing Penguin 2: (angry face emoticon)

Me: (sad face emoticon)

Dancing Penguin 3: Go away or I M reporting U

Report me? As in clicking the monitor badge icon on my player card to tell the CP powers that be that I am behaving inappropriately (which wasn’t true at all)? Couldn’t Dancing Penguin 3 just click on the ghost icon and ignore me for a while (meaning none of the messages I send will show up in bubbles on her screen until she decides to reinstate me to her inner circle)? If I get reported, the monitors could silence me. Or worse yet, they could ban me from Club Penguin altogether! And then what good would I be as an undercover penguin? In the name of damage control, I took the hint and slunk away.

Mom Break: Like so many aspects of children’s virtual worlds, I found Club Penguin’s buzzing social scene to be a mixed bag of fun, fascination, and concern.

I’ll start in the Pro column. When we were growing up, kids ran around the neighborhood with their friends until stars filled the sky. But today not so much. (Why? Because oodles of extracurriculars, mounds of homework, a generally anxiety-ridden parental population, and the advent of the formal playdate have rendered such informal socialization among children ancient practice, but that’s a whole different parenting post.) Consequently, many contemporary kids experience unprecedented feelings of isolation, loneliness, and stress. Virtual social networking, when done safely and in moderation, can provide children with a comforting sense of companionship and community – and not just in the digital realm. Many kids I chatted with in my real world focus sessions reported meeting up with their school friends on Club Penguin at night and on weekends. Social networking at a young age (in secure and kid-oriented environments) helps build critical digital literacy in children while giving parents an opportunity to teach their kids appropriate online behavior and safety rules early in the game.

And now for the Cons. Despite the fact that Club Penguin, like many other sites, works overtime to keep the chat civil, believe me, social cruelty is rampant. A virtual playground is, after all, still a playground with all the classic bullying and power plays. But unlike a real-world playground, there are no parents or teachers around to set the mean kids straight. And, in my mind at least, the website monitors don’t count. (Would you trust a babysitter to watch your kids if she was also responsible for watching millions of other kids at the same time? I think not.) In my first five days on Club Penguin, I was called "weirdo" three times, "nerd" four, and hit with numerous mean face emoticons. I was excluded from eight private igloo parties, told to go away six times, and pummeled with more snowballs than I can count. And as for my encounter with those snobby dancing penguins, well, it felt like junior high all over again. Sure the CP filters prevented them from saying anything blatantly inappropriate, but the penguins' cattiness and cruelty come through like a bullhorn.

I managed to snag some screenshots of (what I consider to be) cyberbullying on Club Penguin. As you look at them, try to imagine how you would feel as a little kid sitting alone in front of a computer screen reading such messages.

Note from editor Anne Collier: For more kinds of cyberbullying in kids' virtual worlds, see "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users" that I wrote, based on an interview with Sharon last summer. For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

My avatar's talk: Online safety 2.0

I - or I should say my avatar Anny Khandr - recently gave some talks about safety on the social Web in the virtual world Second Life. The experiences were great fun and kind of magical on many levels. First, I'm giving my PowerPoint-enabled talk from an easy chair in my family room, using a mic plugged into my laptop. I'm watching myself (or the Anny Khandr cartoon version of me) standing next to my slides before an audience of amazing tech educators around the country, who are all probably listening from easy chairs in their houses too, but at the same time gathered in one place: a beautiful "outdoor" virtual lecture space, complete with stage, screen, benches, and ambient birdsong. We were "gathered" on one of ISTE's islands in Second Life (ISTE for the International Society for Technology in Education, of which both my audience and I are all members).

My, er, Anny's first talk - kindly arranged for by New Jersey tech educator Kevin Jarrett (aka "KJ Hax," who gives teacher tours: see this) - was in a bigger venue and had a substantial audience, but there were problems in the recording process. So the "machinima" you'll see is a more intimate talk I later gave to a small group of avatars/educators, some of whom amazingly came back for seconds! [A machinima is a kind of animated video, or moving screenshots - video recorded within virtual worlds - and can range in subject from "action" videos like what you see in videogames to videos of professionals' avatars giving PowerPoint presentations. Quite the range!] The recording of my talks was done by Marianne Malmstrom, aka the extremely clue-filled "Knowclue Kidd," another great teacher in New Jersey. The whole idea, I think, was Peggy Sheehy's. Peggy, literally a rockstar tech educator (a former rock vocalist), teaches in Suffern, N.Y., and on several islands in Second Life, where she/her avatar is known as Maggie Marat. These educators are the real magic of Second Life to me. If you opened your own account at SecondLife.com, created an avatar, and teleported to ISTE Island, you'd experience what I have: the members' seemingly bottomless kindness and patience and what the tech education part of it has to teach about the gift economy (see this entry in Wikipedia).

The talk is best viewed here, but if anyone would like to download this animated 40-min. talk to their laptop as a better way to show it to fellow parents or educators, please feel free to download it here (it's a huge file, so it can be downloaded either in two parts or in full). Email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org. if you'd like my PPT notes, with links to all sources. If it's a cartoon, it's a serious one - maybe a little boring too, but also a snapshot of the latest research on social Web safety.

Views of Net users young & old: Studies

Lots of international (individual and family) Internet-user data has been released via various studies this past week, courtesy of Symantec, Google, Yahoo, and Skype. Symantec's Norton Online Living Report was very family-oriented, having gathered the views of 9,000 adults and young people in 12 countries! Some interesting findings NetworkWorld led with were that "one in five children admitted getting caught doing something their parents didn't approve of," and parents are using a variety of means to keep better tabs on their kids online activities. "The UK, for example, has the highest usage of software to control Internet use," e.g., filtering or online curfews. A few other interesting findings: "1 in 5 online youth are more willing to communicate with their family about touchy subjects online than on the phone or in person" (great idea - let a text message about your concern kick off a calm parent-child conversation); "89% of online adults and 90% of online children agree that the benefits of using the Internet outweigh the risks," but 60% of parents feel kids spend too much time online. In another just-released sponsored by Google, Yahoo, and Skype, 90% of users in France, Germany, and the UK expect their Internet service providers to offer open and unrestricted access to the Web, Reuters reports. And the New York Times reports that a survey conducted in the US by TRUSTe, the privacy nonprofit, found that "more than 90% of respondents called online privacy a 'really' or 'somewhat' important issue." But in a separate story, the Times asks the good question, "When Everyone's a Friend, Is Anything Private?"

Self-published child porn in UK

I just posted on youth as self-published pornographer, but here's an exhaustive take on the subject from across the Atlantic. In the UK so far, 90 UK youth "have been cautioned as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or their underage friends online or on their mobile phones," the Daily Mail reports. I'll tell you more about the piece in a second but want to zoom right in on the operative word "cautioned." Not "arrested," which is what I'm seeing in too many news reports about sexting over here. That, I think, is what has to be law enforcement's role where sexting's concerned: helping youth understand the tragic, potentially life-changing implications of this behavior. Police are often called in when these incidents involving students occur, and rightly so because this is technically child pornography we're talking about, and producing and distributing such is a crime. But where minors are concerned, this is much more a behavioral than a criminal issue, and I feel it has to be dealt with as such. At the very least school counselors and parents need to be involved as well (I'd appreciate your thoughts on this via anne(at)netfamilynews.org or our forum at ConnnectSafely.org). The article's exaggerated in places (e.g., "the avalanche of pornographic material beamed onto every computer screen unless it is actively blocked"), but the reporter, a foreign correspondent who'd just finished researching online pornography for BBC Radio 4 and - before talking with many UK secondary-school students about it - "was not prepared to hear they were also producing it" and to what extent. And she's a mother of three girls, 12, 14, and 15. "I spoke to children from a range of public and state schools. It is certainly not the case that this behaviour is being perpetrated by those from a deprived background or those who lack intelligence. In fact, it's the privileged, supposedly brightest youngsters who are most at risk," she reports.

Cellphones in the classroom

The cellphone industry says that, in promoting mobile learning, it's making a similar pitch as that of computer makers to educators since the 1980s, the New York Times reports. "The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students." Cellphones are now computers. Mobile carriers point to an industry-funded "study of four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods, where 9th- and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software and special programs meant to help them with their algebra studies. The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25% better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes." A huge factor, according to the teacher who administered the program, was her students' excitement about having the phones, which "made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours" - though it was tough for her to spend her evening hours monitoring the students' text messaging for program violations. See also "Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'" about a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.]

Cellphones in cars

This is definitely good fuel for family discussion - why the National Safety Council recently "called for a nationwide ban on the use of cellphones while driving, citing overwhelming evidence of the risk of injuries and death from driver distraction," as reported in a commentary at the Christian Science Monitor. Or why California "banned texting behind the wheel and, along with several other states, prohibits the use of hand-held phones while allowing drivers to talk with hands-free devices." But even hands-free phone conversations in cars have been found to be risky. Because the risk is not where hands are (or aren't), it's in where the mind is. If the mind is elsewhere while driving, talking is risky even when both hands are free. Research at the University of Utah found that drivers talking on cellphones "performed no better, and by some measures worse, than drivers who were legally drunk," commentator Myron Levin adds. Meanwhile, 80% of cellphone owners make calls while driving, and nearly 20% send text messages, Levin cites a Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. survey as finding. I'm thinking the discussion is only partly about phone in cars. There's a broader, deeper discussion about "presence" that needs to really kick in worldwide. We could talk with our children about how, when we're fully present in what we're doing any given moment - in a car driving, in a classroom listening to a teacher, or on the phone listening to a friend working through something, etc. - then the tools we use (cars, ears, phones) are more likely to be constructive and the experience more likely to be both safe and meaningful.

Cellphones = wireless connected computers

Landlines may be going away (see CNET), but don't think of cellphones merely as their replacement for voice communications - at least not if you're a parent. Because to get a better handle on how young people use phones, think of them as "the world's most ubiquitous computers," as the New York Times put it recently, adding that there are 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide right now. The social network sites certainly get it. MySpace "has seen its mobile user base grow by 400% from last year, and now nearly 20 million users access the site through [mobile] phones," InformationWeek reports, and Facebook "is also looking to expand its mobile presence and is reportedly in talks with Nokia and Motorola for tighter integration into handsets." (BTW, on the landline subject, CNET reported that 17.5% of US households depended solely on cellphones for their phone communications during the first half of 2008, up from 13.6% a year earlier.)

How 1 county is dealing with sexting

In western Massachusetts, the Berkshire County district attorney plans to "produce anti-sexting programs that will begin airing in county schools this spring," the Berkshire Eagle reports. His goal is to keep the problem from growing - he told the Eagle "he would prefer to deal with such matters outside the criminal justice system. If need be, though, offenders could be charged with any of a number of felony crimes." He didn't name the high school where the incident happened because he said he didn't want to stigmatize it, but "more than a dozen students were implicated in the sexting incident, which involved the circulation of explicit photos of a local girl.... No one has been criminally charged in connection with the case. [For other perspectives on the subject, see Slate's "Textual misconduct" and The American Culture blog's "Normalization of Pornography Cited in Texting Issue."]

Kids as inadvertent child pornographers

To sometimes tragic effect, that is what the usually impulsive, unthinking behavior behind sexting can lead to: child child pornographers. "A growing number of teens are ending up in serious trouble for sending racy photos with their cellphones. Police have investigated more than two dozen teens in at least six states this year for sending nude images of themselves in cellphone text messages, which can bring a charge of distributing child pornography," USATODAY reports. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children told USATODAY that, of the 2,100 children it has identified as victims of online porn, a quarter of them "initially sent the images themselves" - photos that can end up mixed in with adult-produced child-abuse images circulating online (Austrian police just reported breaking up a child porn ring operating in 170 countries, the International Herald Tribune reports). Two teens 15 and 18 were recently charged with soliciting and possessing child porn with the intent to distribute after seeking nude pictures from three other kids, one in elementary school, USATODAY adds. This is why I feel critical thinking - about what they send and upload as much as what they receive and download - is essential to youth online safety going forward. Have your kids either read this item or the full USATODAY piece, and they'll probably think twice about being manipulated or impulsive in this way and may even help a friend avoid being so. [See also "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety," "Teen suicide over sexting," and a number of other NFN items on sexting.]

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 4: The 'dating' game

by Sharon Duke Estroff

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that at any given moment in any given corner of any given chatroom on ClubPenguin.com, there is someone saying something to the effect of “boys say i” or “beautiful girls come over here” or “are you single?” or “will u be with me?” - which is exactly what Cowboy217 asked me one moonlit night in his igloo.

We’d met earlier that evening at the pizza parlor when I’d heeded Cowboy’s open call for available girls. By the time we got to Cowboy’s crib (which, I might add, was the Taj Mahal of igloos), we’d already swapped at least a dozen heart emoticons. We played a few rounds of “Spin the Lava”, a popular CP party game involving a lava lamp, some truth or dare, and tons of Eskimo kissing, (I’m not kidding with screenshots to prove it) before he popped the question, and I (trying not to think about how appalled Cowboy217 would be if he knew he’d just asked a married, mother of four to go steady) accepted.

Mom Break: I want to start out by recognizing that Club Penguin has excellent safety measures in place to prevent predators from tracking down children via their website. But keeping our kids safe online doesn't simply mean keeping them away from cyber-predators. It means ensuring their social, emotional, intellectual, moral, and physical well-being in both the real and virtual realms. Which is why, of all my undercover mom surprises to date, I found Club Penguin’s sexual undercurrent by far the most unsettling. It's not that every penguin I encountered on CP was engaged in some kind of flirting or dating behavior, but many were. Many, many, many were. It all makes sense if you think about it. The anonymity and lack of adult supervision in children’s virtual social worlds like Club Penguin make them natural spaces for curious kids to act out sexual themes they see in the media, even before they're ready in real life. There's no doubt that pretend romantic play is part of the course and magic of childhood, but Club Penguin is not a kindergarten dress up corner. It is a vastly populous virtual playground where digital natives of all ages and maturity levels share the same turf...and grow up faster together. (I continue to grapple with scope, implications, and complexity of this issue and welcome your insight on the screenshots that follow.)

"Come here all beautiful girls"

"Where the boyz are"

"Spin the lava at my iggy"

"Me playing spin the lava"

"Looking for the ladies"

"Are u takin?"

"One of many prom invites I received"

At the nightclub: "Who is single?" (we're talking 9-to-12-year-olds!)

Invitation to a "Boys Meet Girls Party" at someone's igloo

Dating drama at the pizza parlor - Sharon explained, "The pizza parlor is one of the most popular destinations in ClubPenguin - there's one in every chatroom, so technically there are hundreds, and there always seems to be lots of dating-related talk in them."

Note from editor Anne Collier: One thing I hope this installment illustrates is why we as a society - as we address child online safety together - can't afford to be focused on fear- instead of research-based messaging about predation online. Predatory behavior, power abuse, and bullying occur at all ages (but so does developmentally appropriate sexual exploration). We also can't afford to focus only on the negative behaviors and experiences in virtual worlds because - though clearly they are not the new Saturday-morning cartoons - there are so many good things occurring in them, including informal learning (see "Serious informal learning: Key online youth study). Sharon's reporting is important - I have seen nothing like it as I survey youth-tech and online-safety news each day. But my other hope is that readers who find this report disturbing will consider the context Sharon's expertise in child development gives it and help channel concerns into a renewed societal effort to teach ethics and citizenship - offline as well as online. Because civil, mindful behavior is protective (see "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety").

For an index of the Undercover Mom series, click here. Next week: Cyberbullying penguins?

Violent videogames 'forbidden fruit': Study

A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that violent-content warnings and ratings on games have the opposite effect they're intended to have. "While research has found that ratings increase the attraction to raunchy TV shows and movies, the hypothesis had never been tested with video games," the Chicago Tribune cites the researchers at VU University Amsterdam and the University of Michigan as saying. They tested "310 Dutch children ranging in age from 7 to 17. Participants read fictitious game descriptions and rated how much or how little they wanted to play each game." Their conclusion in the February issue of Pediatrics was that," although the PEGI system was developed to protect youth from objectionable content, this system actually makes such games forbidden fruits." [The Trib incorrectly states that the article is in the March issue of Pediatrics, but it wisely concludes with the idea of putting "M" ratings on algebra books.]

New Halo game: Focus on strategy

Remember the board game "Risk"? Real-time strategy (RTS) videogames - played from a top-down perspective - are its descendents. Now, with the just-released "Halo Wars," Microsoft has folded RTS into its popular Halo series, USATODAY reports. This is good news for parents in two ways. Not only is strategy more the focus than shooting, it's rated "T" for Teen because it "transports the hit sci-fi game franchise from a first-person shooting style to a more cerebral, real-time strategy mode," according to USATODAY, and this could boost sales for other strategy games. The article mentions several of them.

German teen shooter's threat in chatroom

The 17-year-old German boy who killed 15 people and then himself this week warned about his plans "in an Internet chat room six hours before" he went on a shooting spree in his former high school, the Associated Press reported. The message he posted was seen by "a teen in the neighboring state of Bavaria. The Bavarian teen told his father and then police about the chat when he realized the threat had been real." But police didn't have enough time to locate the boy, apparently. The school, however, had fortunately done some training in case an incident like this should happen. "Authorities said they found some 60 shell casings in the school and that the number of victims could have been much higher had educators and police not carried out a plan learned in an earlier training program preparing them to respond to such a shooting." Pls see the article for details about the boy and the school's warning system. Here's coverage at the New York Times.

Schools: How to handle group cyberbullying?

I have a question for you, but first here's what it's about: A recent group cyberbullying incident involving two high schools in Palo Alto, Calif., has "sparked intense discussion" among parents, school administrators and general community members "about the proper role of the school district" when cyberbullying involves students but doesn't happen on school grounds," Palo Alto Online reports. School officials called the parents of students known to be involved and took no disciplinary action. Each incident is unique, but digital pile-ons are not unusual, in fact a very similar group cyberbullying story in Oregon arrived in my in-box just a few days ago. In both incidents, an "I Hate____" group in Facebook had been established by the bullies, but that development is often not the beginning of an altercation, and it definitely wasn't in the Oregon case. So even the lack of users' anonymity in Facebook couldn't expose every student involved and doesn't get to the bottom of what happened. In the Oregon case (it's hard to tell from the Palo Alto story), even the target of the hate group apparently wasn't completely the innocent victim. It's important to note, though, that in both cases, Facebook deleted the groups upon notification. This isn't the solution (it doesn't end arguments), but it's an important part of the resolution process.

My question is, what do you think school officials should've done? In California, a new law gives schools authority to suspend or expel students for cyberbullying, but as I read through these cases - saw their complexities and how hard it is for schools to know exactly how the argument started, who started it, how many students are involved, whether the victim was the original instigator, or even whether it was staged for the instigators' instant fame online - I think suspension is like a blunt-instrument approach that of course punishes some involved but discourages students from reporting such cases in the future and doesn't resolve what the argument was about. The schools were right to call parents. But tell me if you agree that the schools could also turn incidents like this into "teachable moments" in the form of school assemblies about all possible implications of taking fights public online. In such assemblies or in digital citizenship instruction, schools might teach students the three basic types of leadership behavior described by Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use: "speaking out against the harm, reporting the harm to an adult who is in a position to intervene, and helping the targeted student." Would appreciate your thoughts - via comments here or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org. Feel free, too, to email them to me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Online safety in Turkey

An article in Turkey's English-language newspaper Zaman takes a thorough look at potential negative effects of Internet use on Turkish youth - the first I've seen or heard, including in discussions with Turkish Internet crime experts when I was there about 18 months ago. At that time there wasn't much discussion beyond child-abuse imagery, or child porn, and Internet financial crime. "A significant number of children these days spend much of their free time on the Internet," Zaman reports. "However, their parents often have no idea whether they are spending endless hours playing games online or if they are being victimized by pedophiles in chat rooms. Experts warn that surfing the Web can sometimes be as dangerous for children as wandering through dark city streets." The paper cites Turkish Statistics Institute statistics dated last August, showing that 24.5% of Turkish households are online. In them, "a large number of children are using the Internet on a daily basis to browse Web pages, chat, connect to peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and participate in online forums. Parents and teachers encourage children to use computers to prepare them for the future. Some teachers even assign homework that requires students to search for information on the Internet." The article covers everything from inappropriate content and contact to parental controls to Turkish law to parental responsibility (filters as offering some protection but also a false sense of security). [Thanks to the EC's QuickLinks for pointing this story out.]

Canadian study: Cyberbullying seen as 'cool'

A recent survey found that 40% of Canadian 9-to-17-year-olds say they've been cyberbullied (43% female, 38% male), nearly 60% said there were no consequences, and "some 60% of the respondents agree people bully because it’s 'cool'," reports the Vancouver Sun, citing the survey from Microsoft Canada and market research firm Youthography. The London (Ont.) Free Press reports that Canadian "parents are more involved than ever with their children's online activities," with 84% of respondents saying they've talked with their parents about Internet dangers. Here's the study's press release. In other findings:

9-to-12-year-old Canadians are online just under two hours a day, on average, compared to three hours a day for teens 13-to-17-year-olds

Girls primarily go online to socialize, with "68% saying that is what they value the Internet for" and the same percentage of boys saying they value the ability to play games.

"Teens are more likely than tweens to use the Internet to escape problems, deal with stress and avoid family problems.

30% have lied about their age on a social networking site, and 15% have pretended to be someone they are not.

15% have had their passwords stolen.

76% are very careful about the personal information they divulge online.

Parental social networkers multiplying

Well, an actual group labeled "parents" wasn't measured, but I suspect parents figured prominently in a Nielsen study that found 35-to-49-year-olds are the fastest-growing group in social-network sites. "Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate ... [and] more than two-thirds of the world's online population now visits social networking and blogging sites," USATODAY reports, citing the study. In fact, one out of every 11 minutes of the average Web user's time is spent in a social site, the USATODAY article says, and one out of every 6 minutes in the UK, reports the BBC. The Nielsen study looked at nine countries. Among these, Brazil was No. 1 in social networking and blogging with 80% of Net users visiting such sites. Spain and the US were Nos. 2 and 3, at 75% and 67%, respectively, according to USATODAY. Social networking has surpassed Web email among top computer activities across the user population, the (others are search, portals, and PC software). As for mobile social networking, the numbers of Britons accessing a social site via their phone was up 249% (the BBC doesn't say, but that's probably in the past year). If you're a parent in Facebook or MySpace, check out "Virtual helicopter parenting" and, in the Los Angeles Times, "Big Mother is watching."

Online music lessons taking off

Some 800,000 people have watched YouTube videos of musicians teaching them how to play Colbie Caillat's 2007 hit 'Bubbly' on guitar," USATODAY reports; Sting teaches "Roxanne" himself in Apple's GarageBand software, one of many music lessons in the application's latest version; "Edison Mellor-Goldman, 17, a Los Angeles-area high school student, likes to go home from school and make video tutorials using his iMac computer's built-in webcam.... He's made 33 videos. His most popular - how to play Jason Mraz's 'I'm Yours' - has been viewed 200,000 times on YouTube"; and UK musician Justin Sandercoe gives video lessons in his own site, Justinguitar.com, which "attracts 600,000 viewers a month," according to USATODAY. Sandercoe's "lesson on how to play Guns 'N Roses' 'Sweet Child o' Mine' has picked up more than 2 million views." Through all these digital resources, music learning is getting a big boost. Joe Lamond, president of the National Association of Music Merchants, a trade group for music stores (where most guitar lessons are held), says the growth of online video lessons has paid off with more-attentive students." He credits the Internet and videogames like Guitar Hero for the fact that guitar sales are up 3%, he told USATODAY.

Teen's suicide over sexting

It's a tragedy no parent can imagine, and this teenage suicide was over nude photos she sent to her "boyfriend" last spring. Her mother, Cynthia Logan, went public on national television today so that other teens won't make the same mistake. The sexting incident involving her only child, then-18-year-old Jesse Logan. NBC reports that "she had sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls. The girls were harassing her, calling her a slut and a whore. She was miserable and depressed, afraid even to go to school." Her mother told Today "she never knew the full extent of her daughter’s anguish until it was too late. Cynthia Logan only learned there was a problem at all when she started getting daily letters from her daughter’s school reporting that the young woman was skipping school." The tragedy illustrates the importance of getting and keeping young people talking with parents or other trusted adults about the online and on-phone part of their social lives too. A recent study at UCLA found that only 10% of youth report incidents of digital harassment and bullying (see "Online harassment: Not telling parents."

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 3: Anybody here speak English?!

By Sharon Duke Estroff

I’m beginning to understand why kids are so obsessed with Club Penguin. It’s a posh ski vacation via DSL connection. There’s snow tubing, ski lifts, and an ice hockey rink; a coffee shop, pizza joint, and discothèque; even a beach complete with surfboards, sun umbrellas and an outdoor fire pit (photo links below). And they’re all packed like sardines with friend-seeking penguins (upwards of 20 million of them, estimates UK-based virtual-worlds research firm K Zero). I feel so hip, so happening, so popular!

Next day: Not feeling quite so hip and popular today. Mainly because all my would-be penguin pals seem to be speaking a foreign language. Sure I recognize a few words, like “hi” and “igloo.” I’m even holding my own at deciphering the horrific misspellings (sorry, it’s the teacher in me). But ROTFL? NVM? What is this, penguinese?

Following some snooping around the Internet for an English-Penguinese translation guide, I’ve surmised that the mysterious lexicon is actually a series of cryptic acronyms and shorthand that kids use to communicate online. More Pig Latin than Greek, you might say. "ROTFL" is “rolling on the floor laughing” and "NVM" is “never mind.” Kids also use “emoticons” (e.g., the smiley face) to communicate their moods of the moment.

Mom Break: From a parental supervision standpoint, this is not good news. Not only are our kids hanging out in a parallel universe, they’re speaking in alien tongues while they’re at it. This generational fluency gap is bound to result in millions of parents not understanding what their kids and their friends are discussing. Worse yet, not every cyber-acronym is innocuous (i.e. "PRW," or "Parents Are Watching"). Granted, the Disney Company - which acquired Club Penguin in 2007 in a 700 million dollar deal - has filters in place to prevent shady shorthand from infiltrating the conversational landscape. But the reality remains that staying a cyberstep ahead of the Net generation can be tough - even for Mickey Mouse. I found one clever penguin inserting an extra letter in order to use language that's not allowed in Club Penguin: He asked someone, "Are you gay?"

Next week: "Cold Shoulders." Here are my intro to Undercover Mom and Part 1 and Part 2 of Sharon's series.

Undercover Mom's screenshots [Anne here: Sorry I can't embed them in this blog at the moment!]

ChillyLily437 on the Beach

Downtown Club Penguin

Penguinese spoken here

Textual workaround

Facebook: 'Facelift,' lawsuit

Seems like every week's a big week for Facebook! This week saw the beginning of functionality changes for users which will "over time enable user 'profiles' to serve more as individual Web pages that could convey messages far beyond the current 5,000-'friend' limit," the San Jose Mercury News reports. The Mercury News said changes will include: users being able to categorize their "friends" into "separate and sometimes overlapping subgroups, such as 'family,' 'close friends' and ''co-workers'," and users able to "more easily post links, photos or videos with their comments into the 'stream' of information to and from the Facebook site [parents, ask your kids to keep you posted on how this works and whether they're paying attention to privacy settings in the midst of this]." Meanwhile, Information Week reports that "a New York teenager has sued the social networking site and some of its users because of a Facebook chat group where she says she was ridiculed and disgraced." In such cases so far, the Communications Decency Act has protected social network sites and other Internet service providers from being held liable for content users post on their sites.

Digital native-eye-view of parenting

Vanessa Van Petten is not a teenager, but she plays one to great effect on YouTube (she's also not all that long past the teen years, so her credibility is high). With a fun, breathlessly paced song to Mom from her loving daughter, see Vanessa's kid's response to Anita Renfroe's Mom Song - also to the William Tell Overture. See also her blog, OnTeensToday.com.

Girls' (social) fashion 2.0

Fashionology.com is pretty brilliant - but also a no-brainer retail for digital natives. It's not just brick & mortar retail for tween girls (it's online too). It's not just a t-shirt printing shop (it's hoodies, skirts, and dresses too, and it's design, production, and modeling). It's not just an individual design experience (it's a collective one too, online and offline, in fact it can be an on-demand girls' party). It definitely takes the Build-a-Bear, Webkinz, and ClubPenguin concepts to the next level (online, it's more social site than virtual world). A user is not just designing or using virtual and/or real objects or avatars; she's engaged in both or either virtual and/or real-world collaborative self-expression whose product she herself can wear to the "party" that the whole experience in effect becomes. Some may disdain all this as the commercialization of youth, but it would be hard to deny that creativity's involved - the kind that supports and energizes the highly collaborative m.o. of digital natives. The company itself sees its Hollywood retail store and Web site as "a dynamic new retail paradigm where girls can define and empower themselves through creativity and design," and - though Web designs do lead to a shopping cart and credit card input - at least the site lets girls create, collect, and share their designs without having to buy them. And it is a whole lot of fun - if economic reality, self-discipline, or parent allows - to be able to dress oneself, not just an avatar. So far there's just one Fashionology store - in Hollywood - another experience in creative networking or social producing. There - singly, with a friend or two, or as a whole group of birthday partygoers - girls can browse, design, produce, model, photograph and be photographed (see "Our Story").

Sexting in Canada too

"Canadian teenagers are increasingly finding themselves in trouble after images of themselves get posted on the Internet," reports the CBC, citing reports from Cybertip.ca, Canada's equivalent to the US's CyberTipline.com. "Respect Yourself" is the message of Cybertip.ca's new campaign to raise awareness of this problem. "In more than six years, 5% of 30,000 tips have been received from teenagers ... and many of those cases involved a young person who has either posted a picture of himself or herself on the Internet or forwarded a nude photo to a boyfriend and then regretted that after the photo has been shared with others," the online-child-exploitation hotline says. The toughest part of this is how hard it is to delete those photos. Even if responsible sites with customer-service departments delete them, there's no guarantee they weren't copied and posted elsewhere beforehand. [Another very kid-friendly education site for avid texters and photo-sharers is ThatsNotCool.com (see my coverage, "Stalking texters, sexting monsters."]

Young practitioners of social media literacy!

What do you get when you cross Greek mythology with a media literacy class on paid political advertising? Well, if you're media literacy teacher Marianne Malmstrom, you get 30-sec. video ads about kicking various lesser gods off Olympus that end with "I am Zeus, and I approve of this message" (see "The Dog Ate My Homework" project at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, N.J.). This is media literacy education 2.0. It can take many forms, but this approach teaches critical thinking about media messages by having students create their own messages collaboratively, using social media - in this case, the Second Life virtual world. Malmstrom's students created avatars, wrote scripts, and "filmed" and edited machinima (like video screenshots, or "movies" of what's happening in a virtual world). Check out the first ad on that page (it's only 30-some seconds). Also don't miss this 5:46 video, "No Future Left Behind," created by multiple stars at Suffern Middle in Suffern, N.Y., with the help of tech and media teacher Peggy Sheehy. It's a keynote presentation for the Net Generation Education Project involving 10 schools. The students were asked about how education was preparing them for the future, and their collective answer is an appeal to us adults to allow them to learn in school the way they already are on the Internet, as social media practitioners and producers and as fluent "information hunter-gatherers," as MIT media professor Henry Jenkins put it. "Education really needs an upgrade," the first line of the students' video goes.

The Dunbar no. & online social networks

A few years ago, extrapolating from her study of primates, Oxford Unviersity-based anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that "the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," The Economist reports. That's usually rounded off to 150 and called "the Dunbar number." The Economist interviewed Facebook's "in-house sociologist," Cameron Marlow, whose findings pretty much match up with the Dunbar number - an average of around 120 "friends," but ranging from a handful to thousands. I've long suspected that people whose friend lists are at the upper end of the spectrum are marketing more than being friends or, in the case of young adolescents, working through the "popularity contest" that school social scenes can represent. Here's the thing, though: Marlow told The Economist that the average person with 120 Facebook friends responds to the comments of (keeps in close touch with) only 7-10 friends (men at the low end of that range) - their "core network." Beyond that are the "casual contacts that people track more passively." The Economist ends with the observation that "humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever." Not that everybody uses social network sites to advertise themselves, but I do think the second half of that observation is exactly right. [See also the UK's NewScientist.com on "how social networking might change the world."]

Xbox Live hackers, Koobface worm

This is something for Xbox Live gamers to think about, especially if they also have computers connected to the home network. If the Xbox Live users at your house are particularly feisty or contentious, they could get booted out of games by hackers who have figured out how to get the offending gamer's IP address. They then use that address to launch a kind of denial-of-service attack that blocks your gamer's access to the game, the BBC reports. It could also affect other Internet connections on the network. "Microsoft is 'investigating' the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live. One preventive measure is try to get Xbox Live users at your house to "play nice." If they do and they still get booted, those are really malicious hackers. Definitely contact Xbox Live customer support! Another security issue this week is the reemergence of the Koobface worm in Facebook and MySpace. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post cites TrendMicro as explaining that what happens is, social networkers get an invitation from a friend or contact, inviting them "to click on a link and view a video at a counterfeit YouTube site." Then they're told they "need to install an Adobe Flash plug-in to view the video," but what they really download, if they fall for it, is a Trojan horse program that lets attackers take over their computer.

*Social* classifieds: Safer

Combine social networking and classifieds and online buying and selling really start to make sense. Why? Because you can get a much better feel for who you're dealing with. You can peruse the profile of the person who responded to your ad. Even better, you can go to your network of friends and acquaintances first when you're ready to unload that laptop or car, no screening required. And you can donate the proceeds to a charity of your choice in a few clicks. I'm mentioning all this because Oodle, which started providing online classifieds to MySpace last summer, today launches Facebook Marketplace (disclosure: Oodle is a sponsor of NetFamilyNews, but even if it weren't I'd tell you that selling stuff to the wider circle of friends and acquaintances that social networking allows makes sense and is safer than other forms of classifieds online and offline). Where charitable selling on Facebook is concerned, members "can go to Marketplace, post a listing and select ‘Sell for a Cause.’ Once posted, the listing will be distributed to their friends through news feeds allowing the seller to tap their social network for fundraising." This classified advertising's free. Here's the San Jose Mercury News's coverage, and here's Oodle's own Safety & Fraud Center.

Terms of use: Social Web bill of rights?

It's a big headache, Facebook's experiment in folding users' input into updating its terms of use, but so is democracy! And by definition - as a user-driven or -produced medium - Web 2.0 is more democratic than any that preceded it. Revising terms of service in this participatory way actually makes them relevant. I wonder why it has taken so long to get here, actually (maybe partly because all eyes were directed to predators by politicians and the news media, with the relentless message that it's entirely up to these social-media companies, like their mass-media predecessors, to control the content they "broadcast"). Now, as my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid wrote in CNET, Facebook's "officials seem to be trying to figure out what it means to run a company where users, not professionals, provide most of the content. In some senses, Facebook is a media company but unlike newspapers, TV networks and even most blogs, its contributors aren't employees or contractors. It's those 175 million members." Terms of use can no longer viably be written entirely by corporate lawyers "for other lawyers, in the hope that their lengthy recitation of claims leaves no room for a lawsuit," as the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro put it. Nor can Facebook afford simply to "grind" users' reactions and edits to its proposed user "bill of rights" "into the usual legalistic sludge." Pegararo suggests Facebook should put its draft in a wiki that users can edit as in Wikipedia. The only problem is, Wikipedia doesn't need the input of corporate lawyers on its "encyclopedia" entries. The other problem is what adequate representation is for Facebook's 175 million "citizens." If more than 7,000 people comment on a new policy, Larry Magid points out, "the policy will be put to a vote and the result 'will be binding if more than 30% of all active registered users vote." Thirty percent of 175 million is 53 million. This will be an amazing experiment indeed if that many people vote! In any case, this is a great discussion to be having - it's important to make terms of use relevant. [Here's a transcript of Facebook's 2/26 press conference on this at CNET.]