Cyberbullying on the rise in Oz

A 9-year-old girl receiving porn on her cell phone, a 12-year-old being text-stalked (harassed via text messages) on his. Of course, cyberbullying also happens in chat, IM, and email. What has become fairly common in the UK - especially via cell phones - is now hitting radar screens in Australia. "A 2002 UK study found that one in four children has been bullied by computer or cell phone," Australian IT reports. The problem is, this virtual type of bullying is even less apparent to adults than "traditional" bullying is. "A parent can't always monitor their child on the computer or phone." The Australian IT article is a good overview of the problem and of steps being taken in that country. See too a feature in the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter last February and the premier cyberbullying info site: Bill Belsey's Cyberbullying.ca.

Brits tackle Net plagiarism

Some 25% of undergraduates had plagiarized using the Internet, according to an unnamed survey cited by the BBC. And that's a conservative figure, one university student is quoted as saying. So Northumbria University's Plagiarism Advisory Service is testing a plagiarism detection system that scans students' work against 4.5 billion Web pages. The candid student makes a good point about the need to use this type of software in school: Only recently have students been taught how to reference Web content properly in research papers. Students also deserve to know how limited the public Web actually is for source material and how to determine the value of the material they find on it. For more on this see "Librarians: Better than Google" in last week's newsletter and "Critical thinking: Kids' best research tool" in our 5/30/03 issue.

Still undecided on COPA

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) has enormous spring to it. It just bounced back to a federal appeals court in Philadelphia from the Supreme Court for the third time, with the US's highest court deciding 5-4 that "a law meant to punish pornographers who peddle dirty pictures to Web-surfing kids is probably an unconstitutional muzzle on free speech," as the Associated Press put it. The justices didn't actually strike down the law; they told the lower court to see if technology (such as filtering) hasn't improved enough since the law was first passed in 1998 to take care of the child-protection problem without a law having to intervene (this will be the third time the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has considered COPA). The Supreme Court justices know that filtering is flawed, but even more flawed, the majority opinion held, is a law that jeopardizes First Amendment rights. In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said COPA is indeed constitutional and "would be less restrictive than filters and other alternatives," the New York Times reports, quoting Justice Breyer: "That matters in a world where the obscene and the nonobscene do not come tied neatly into separate, easily distinguishable, packages."



It's important for the courts to get the final decision on COPA right, whatever "right" means in this ongoing, unprecedented clash between free speech and children's rights, because it could establish the framework for future regulation of cyberspace. Here's further coverage at CNET, the BBC, and, on earlier COPA milestones, at NetFamilyNews.org. Here is the syllabus of the Supreme Court's decision today.

Game includes virtual rape

There is nothing to stop a child from visiting the new adult-only, online role-playing game Sociolotron but this on its entry page: "By entering the site you declare that: 1) You are 21 years of age or older; 2) It is legal for you to read about interactive erotic role playing involving erotic text and erotic images; 3) You are not offended by reading about a highly politically incorrect form of roleplaying; and 4) ...you have read and understood the Legal Terms and Conditions and you agree to all of these terms and that all statements made in the terms about visitors of our site and customers of the Sociolotron game are true for you." Then they click on "The above is true for me. Let me in" and they're there, joining others living out their "darkest fetish fantasies" or joining a cult, the source of whose "magic rituals" is "among the darkest and most depraved secrets of the world."



Players of EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. may be tempted to move on to Sociolotron because, according to Wired News, it has monster battles and other fantasy fare like that of many multiplayer games, in addition to sexual fantasy. The game begs big questions, such as whether this type of role-playing legitimizes rape in impressionable minds, along the lines of pedophiles' practice of exposing children to images of other children's abuse as a way, experts say, of persuading them that this behavior is "normal." In its article on Sociolotron, "Pursuing the Libido's Dark Side," Wired News paraphrases one source as saying that "people shouldn't be afraid that the game's players will step away from their computers filled with violent lust.... In fact ... the fact that rape and other so-called bad acts are possible in a game like Sociolotron can actually be a valuable social experiment." Parents also might want to know that the game includes chat - "private between the people in the room, but everybody has a log of this text," the game's publishers explain.

One mom's online-safety formula

In response to my 4/30 and 5/14 features on the challenge of kids accessing porn through online image searches, mother and educator Krista in North Carolina emailed us: "I have to laugh out loud whenever I hear parents tell me they don't know how to stop their children from going into porn sites or various chat rooms they don't approve of. In our home the rule is clear: If I find out, or you get caught, then you lose all privileges to use the Internet at home. I take the keyboard with me to work as well as the mouse - that way, they can't use the Internet even when they figure out how to bypass the security I have installed. Children are a lot smarter than we give them credit for and I take no chances with mine.... (For more, please click to this week's issue of the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter.) Have a great weekend!

Librarians: Better than Google

Contrary to what avid Googlers may think, we need librarians more than ever. To help us find information and to help us evaluate it. We need to help our children see this too. "While the accuracy of online information is notoriously uneven, the ubiquity of the Web means that a trip to the stacks is no longer the way most academic research begins," the New York Times reports. Then there's all the solid information not available to a Google search (or that of any other search engine) - some 500 billion pages, according to estimates cited by the Times. "The biggest problem is that search engines like Google skim only the thinnest layers of information that has been digitized. Most have no access to the so- called deep Web, where information is contained in isolated databases like online library catalogs."



In other library news, New Hampshire libraries are refusing to use filtering software and are willing to forgo federal connectivity subsidies from the e-Rate in order to provide Net access without filters, the Associated Press reports. Instead, libraries explain to patrons that the Net is not filtered and require children under 18 to have a parent or guardian's permission to use the Internet. Under the Children's Internet Protection Act, upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago, libraries that receive federal e-rate funds have until the end of this month to install Internet filters on their computers.

Phone-enhanced sleep-overs

Actually, the sleep-over part is just one application of a phone-based dating service used in Singapore. Nineteen-year-old Gracinia Kim uses the "BEDD" service on her phone to scan strangers' phones for their personal profiles. She told Reuters that, with it, she has become close to people she wouldn't have otherwise met and developed a tight little group of friends with whom she "chills out," has sleep-overs, and goes for late suppers. Users download the BEDD software into their phones and complete a short profile of themselves, including a description of who they want to meet. Then BEDD searches for and exchanges compatible profiles and phone numbers with other mobiles within a 65-foot radius. Nightclubs and other hangouts are where these spontaneous introductions happen. BEDD has more than 1,000 users in Singapore and hosts get-togethers in coffee bars. "Other mobile-based dating services in Asia — such as Singapore Telecommunications' MyCupid and Bharti Airtel of India's TrackUrMate — exchange information through a central database," Reuters adds.

Solstice's share of P2P lawsuits

Parents of digital music fans, please note: Summer's official arrival brought another batch of 482 file-sharer lawsuits from the RIAA. The litigation campaign against "music pirates" started a year ago this week, but the question remains about whether these apparent ritual purgings of the most prolific pirates are having the effect the recording industry seeks. "The number of users on Kazaa, still the most popular file-swapping network, has declined somewhat over the past year, while showing considerable seasonal fluctuation," reports CNET, citing analysts. "However, the popularity of other online networks - particularly a newer rival called eDonkey - has grown substantially over that time." Then again, file-sharers are said to be very aware of the lawsuits, now amounting to nearly 3,500. The two biggest impacts of the litigation, according to a CNET source at a company that "seeds" the file-sharing services with fake files in order to downgrade file-swappers' experience, are 1) a lot more swappers downloading but not sharing music on their hard drives (which certainly eats away at the source of all this music, as well as the networks' whole business model) and 2) the most popular service, Kazaa, is losing users to other, lesser-known networks that file-sharers probably see as "safer" or more lawsuit-free.

Smartest mobile users: Kids

It's not a huge surprise. UK kids 10-14 are quickly becoming the most sophisticated cell-phone users, according to the latest study by British research firm Teleconomy. "Even toddlers are able to tell the difference between incoming phone calls and text messages," the BBC reports. Seventy-one percent of kids are aware of video phones, compared to 54% of adults, and some 66% know about Java applications like games, as opposed to 44% of adults. Here are some other findings: For kids, phones are more like computers here in the US - more for downloading things "such as pop news, games and ringtones" than for communicating. "Phone functions" is what they zoom right in on, so they can personalize their phones. Because one's mobile can be a ticket into certain social groups, the study found. Also, "in some cases the phones themselves are becoming 'virtual playgrounds,' as children fill their free time with texting their friends and playing games."

Family-friendly phones

Parents and kids generally like different things in cell phones. For teens they're as much fashion statement as communications tool. Of course, parents aren't immune - I love my ringtone (handpicked by my son). This week CNET compares four phones that are strong in the design area as well as in the features they offer, and they're easy on the wallet to boot. And for those family roadtrips, also from CNET: 10 games for the cell phone (don't forget to pack your battery recharger!).

Hollywood's looking for bootleggers

Do you know any kids who are taking videocams to the movies they go to? If so, they need to be aware of the legal and ethical implications. The former just got a lot more tangible this week. The US movie industry is now offering movie theater employees rewards of up to $500 for every person they catch recording films in their theaters and report to the police, Reuters reports. The Motion Picture Association of America has decided that the vast majority of bootlegged films that turn up on the Internet for free downloading (via file-sharing networks like Kazaa) are from video cameras recording in theaters. "Overseas labs then use the pirated films to create illegal DVDs, which are distributed en masse on street corners around the world," according to Reuters. And that cost the film industry about $3.5 billion last year, according to the MPAA.

Kids confused about Net risks

Parents aren't the only ones not helped by scary stories about online risks to kids. Children, too, need a balanced, level-headed approach to Net safety training, the University of London's Institute of Education found. Its researchers asked UK students 8-18 about what "dangers they face online," and the students replied, "bomb-making, blackmail, HIV, asylum seekers, aliens, and blindness," according to The Guardian. "Some children confused paedophiles with hackers or thought they sent viruses via 'spam' or junk emails.... Teaching children to think critically and behave responsibly when using the Internet enabled them to gauge what risks the technology really poses, and how to handle those problems, said the researchers." More and more educators are pointing to the importance of helping children develop critical thinking skills and media literacy. Tech literacy without these skills - along with excessive parental fears - weights the balance on the risks side. "Parental fears about the Internet mean that children are not being given the information they need to behave safely and sensibly online," according to The Register. "Unfounded fears that children are meeting murderers online and that chatrooms lead to sexual abuse mean that real and more frequent dangers of Web use are ignored. Blanket restrictions on Internet use leave children unprepared and unable to protect themselves."

Teen convicted for eBay scam

Cole Bartiromo, a 19-year-old in California, will go to prison for defrauding users of eBay's auction services. He was sentenced to 33 months and ordered to pay $20,000 back to eBay users to whom he sold items he never sent, The Register reports. This was not his first exploit. "He was also found guilty of bank fraud for trying to convince a Wells Fargo employee to wire $400,000 to an offshore account he had set up," and, when he was 17 and still in high school, the SEC made him pay investors back $900,000 after he scammed them for $1 million, claiming to offer risk-free bets on sporting events.

Rethinking 'stranger danger': Part 2

Last week, I featured Janis Wolak - mother, sociologist, and research professor at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. One of my takeaways from a phone interview with her is the suggestion that, before we start trying to explain anything in a one-way, us-to-them sort of arrangement, it might help first to understand how the online social scene works in our kids' lives. There's a lot to learn - their online/offline blend of a social life is unprecedented. Here's one approach Janis suggested: "When your child has some friends over, talk with them frankly about their Net activities in general, then get more specific and ask them how they form relationships on the Internet.... Do you know anybody at school who's met a friend online, then offline? How did they get together? "It's not so much that we need to be telling kids, 'don't have sex with 40-yr-old men'," she continued. "We need to be talking with kids about Internet relationships in general." Here's more on this in the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter. Email me anytime about conversations you and your kids have had about this - your experiences would be great to share with other parents!

Harry Potter creator's home page

JKRowling.com - not the forthcoming Book 6 or the just-released movie under a new director - is the most significant Harry Potter development, according to the New York Times. Said to be entirely written by Rowling herself, "the site has tallied 76 million page views in just a few weeks," the Times reports. The only problem is, it's designed to dispel rumors and guesswork about future developments, and rumors and guesswork are major fan fuel. What hard-core fan would prefer reading the truth?!

Cool games on cell phones

Charge up your batteries! Or at least, get ready for major competition with your kids over the family cell phones or time on their battery chargers. And not just for communicating with or taking pictures of their friends. Because very cool, graphically intense games are coming to a cell phone near you. "The switch from stubby cartoon figures to graceful golfers and lifelike superheroes is likely to be swift," the New York Times reports, because the games will probably be ready about the same time as phones will have the sophisticated graphics chips needed to support them. Actually, you know how some people use those teeny iPods with their 30- and 40-gig hard drives to carry around and transfer files from their desktop PCs? Well, cell phones are really becoming more and more computer-like too. And, believe me, kids will find ways to use their phones as computers just as much as game platforms. Get them to teach you how!

Dublin on protecting young 3G phone users

Dublin is taking unparalleled care to protect young users of next-generation cell phones. Because the Irish government sees 3G phones as potential "tools of pedophiles," Wired News reports, it's establishing a national register that "will require the name and address of anyone who buys a 3G phone to ensure that people who use it abusively, either to target children or to access or distribute child pornography, can be traced to their physical address." Wired News explains that 2G phones have always-on Net access like DSL; 3G phones have full-time access but at even faster speeds, making images and video much more part of the phone users' online experience. The government reasons it's simply getting in on the ground floor of the market for this new model of phone - to provide a deterrent to porn distribution more than a blanket solution, Wired News adds. Certainly the move has its critics, who say it represents "infringement of civil liberties for little real benefit." And cell phone companies are working on filtering and other protection technologies.

Taking on hate

Any effort to reduce our children's exposure to online hate is good, and this week's conference on the subject in Paris was remarkable just in its level of participation. "Officials from more than 60 countries were attending the two-day conference aimed at finding ways to keep racist information off the Web without compromising free speech and freedom of expression," USAToday reports. European governments see hate Web sites as a factor in the growing number of hate crimes. Certainly, the number of hate sites is on the rise. In the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter last month, I mentioned new figures from the UK showing that the number of hate and violence sites had increased 25% since this past January and 300% since 2000. UK Net filtering company SurfControl monitors nearly 3,000 sites that "promote hatred against Americans, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals and people of non-European ancestry, as well as graphic violence."

Blocking P2P in high school now

In some high schools around the country all the tune-swapping happening in the lunchroom may actually be replaced by lunch. According to CNET, what used to be a preoccupation of college and university network administrators has moved down to the high school level. "Filtering technology from Audible Magic has been installed at several high schools around the country, most recently at private Bellarmine College Preparatory School in San Jose, Calif., and a technical high school in Cape Cod, Mass.," CNET reports.

Nemo's coming to a PC near you

Finding Nemo and most other films shown on the Starz cable network will soon be available online, the New York Times reports. "The new service, called Starz Ticket on Real Movies, will cost $12.95 a month, and subscribers will be able to download and watch 100 or more movies each month, using Real's media player software," according to the Times, which adds that the move is part of Hollywood's effort to head off the kind of financial losses like those the recording industry says it's experiencing because of MP3 file-sharers' piracy. Here are USAToday and the Washington Post on the new service, which launched this week.

Rethinking 'stranger danger'

Janis Wolak is a mother of two (17 and 20), sociologist, and research professor at UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center. I recently heard her present her latest findings on Net-based sexual exploitation of children and found them very pertinent to parents. I'm sharing them with you - in a two-part series in the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter (starting this week)- because I haven't seen Janis's fresh perspective represented anywhere in the media or other public forums.



What stood out to me in Janis's findings (soon to be published by the Journal of Adolescent Health) was that "stranger danger" is not the right warning message for teenagers who spend time in online chat, where they are nonetheless most likely to encounter strangers. Young victims of online sexual exploitation don't think of their assailants as strangers. In 50% of cases involving online exploitation, investigators believed the victims were in love with or felt close to offenders. (For perspective, parents should know that Net-initiated sex crimes against kids represent a fraction of overall sexual exploitation of children in the US - in 2000, there were 500 arrests for Net-related crimes vs. 65,000 overall.) For more on this, click here.

One teen's very easy summer job

It's one of his summer jobs, anyway. In the last few weeks, a 15-year-old in Atlanta has made almost as much money on the Internet as he expects to make all summer working at a local restaurant. He's been selling hard-to-obtain Google Gmail accounts on eBay. "An upcoming free email service from the popular search engine has people so eager to get an account before all the catchy email account names are swept up that they're willing to pay for one of the relatively few test accounts available," the Washington Post reports. Pierce noticed that one eBay seller was selling multiple accounts, so he bought a bunch for "a little under $30 apiece," according to the Post, and turned around and resold them for around $60 each. His highest bidder paid him $102.60, and he'd made over $1,000 as of June 6. Alas, these eBay niche markets can be short-lived. Four days later we read in Wired News that "the bottom had fallen out of the market for Gmail invitations." As of this past Wednesday afternoon, sellers were lucky if they got $20 per.

International police patrols in chat

Police in individual departments, agencies, and state-level Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces have been monitoring chatrooms to catch Net-based sexual predators for years. Now chatroom monitoring is a multinational project. Hoping to introduce a "24/7 presence on the Internet," police in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the US are planning joint chatroom patrols, the Associated Press reports. Not pretending to be able to have a presence in every chatroom, the officers say they're hoping to have a deterring effect for pedophiles, the way patrolling cops do on neighborhood streets, according to the AP. The agencies involved are the UK's National Crime Squad, the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Australian Federal Police.

Net-enhanced 'learning'

Just about any kid knows that instant term papers can be acquired for a fee at Web sites like SchoolSucks.com, Papers4Less.com, EssayTown.com, and GeniusPapers.com. "Some even sell admissions essays for college applications," the Sacramento Bee reports. The article sites a study finding that "50% of 4,500 students surveyed at 25 high schools said they had engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments by using the Internet." Besides the ethical issues, there are serious risks to the academic careers of students who use these services, because many educators are on to this services and know how to detect purchased work and cut 'n' paste plagiarism. And now legislation - in California, at least - may ensue. A lawmaker there wants to send a message to these sites catering to academic laziness, according to the Bee. "Assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy, R-Monrovia, fed up with online cheating, has proposed legislation to bar profiteers from selling, distributing, or writing term papers for buyers to submit for high school credit." An assemblywoman on the Democratic side of the aisle agrees that these sites are cheating children out of education. Civil libertarians disagree, and the resulting debate is one of the typical free-speech vs. regulation discussions that the Internet stirs up at every level of government.

Marketing to the digerati (teens)

Does your kid have a special relationship with Procter & Gamble? If so - to marketers, anyway - there's method to this madness. Procter & Gamble's experimental teen marketing unit, Tremor, has established relationships with more than 200,000 teen movers and shakers - "people who operate in multiple social circles and are likely to talk openly [including online, of course] about the products they use," ClickZ.com reports. The teens like the arrangement because they get free samples and they're "flattered and excited to be among the first to get a look at the product." Another marketer, BrandPort, pays teens to watch its ads - $5 for every 10 ads watched (their reactions are part of the deal). In both cases, the idea is to get the young person - who spreads the word via chat, IM, email, blogs, journal sites, etc. - to "engage with the brand." These extraordinary measures are increasingly needed, advertisers say, because media consumption has changed, and young people not only watch less TV and use the Web more, they multitask, using both or more media simultaneously. Which means they're slightly distracted in any single medium like TV. Marketing now is more targeted and more assertive, and "viral" online communications have to be part of the media mix, these marketers say. Either scary or simply marketing evolution, depending on one's point of view - send your anytime via feedback@netfamilynews.org, or post right here.

The patch all Mac users need

This is the computer security story that keeps needing updates. This time it looks as if Apple has issued a patch that really covers all known holes. Wired News reported today that "Security Update 2004-06-07, released noiselessly on Monday morning, closes major gaps in the way OS X handles browser helper applications. The fix is the first acknowledgment from Apple of the vulnerabilities, although they have been discussed publicly since late May." Apple recommends that all Macintosh users download this patch and provides details here on the security problems it fixes.

Leapster: For parents or kids?

Our family may be unusual, but in our case the LeapPad latptop-like system was more for us than for our son. He played with it on his own about three times and that was the end of it. We didn't feel inclined to force it on him, though I suspect most parents would justifiably want more of a return on their investment. Judging from this Washington Post piece, the same may not be true for the Leapster and Dylan, 5, and Anna, 8, who tested this newer, Gameboy-like product by LeapFrog for their mother, Post writer Hope Katz Gibbs. They liked it, is seems, but it's not clear whether or not they were playing with it of their own accord, and Hope suggests the jury will be out until more (educational) games are available for it. We'd love to hear your family's experiences with these extremely popular LeapFrog products, experiences which I have a feeling will confirm my family's in the minority. The address, of course, is feedback@netfamilynews.org.

BT to block child porn

Internet service providers have been saying the technology isn't available and such filtering wouldn't be economically feasible. But this week British Telecom, the UK's largest high-speed ISP announced it would soon start blocking all child pornography, The Guardian reports. Child pornography is illegal in most countries. The move "would not have been possible a year ago, but improvements in computer processing speeds means that the company is now able to block Web sites, offensive pages, and even individual images of abuse" with a technology called Cleanfeed that BT's been testing in consultation with the British Home Office. BT is talking with other ISPs about adopting the technology and will license it to them as wholesale customers, the BBC reports. The BBC adds that this development, however, will have little impact on pedophiles, who will still have plenty of avenues available to them for child-porn trafficking, such as newsgroups, chat, file-sharing, and IM. An analysis at The Register, which explains how Cleanfeed works, adds that the technology isn't even a complete solution technically - "it only looks at port 80" on subscribers' PCs, and port 80 only deals with Web surfing, not email, file-sharing, IM-ing, etc.



As for the free-speech angle, The Guardian suggests that BT's move "will lead to the first mass censorship of the Web attempted in a Western democracy." Filtering at this level had been "associated only with oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China, which have censored sites associated with dissidents. But many in the field of child protection believe that the explosion of paedophile sites justifies the crackdown," according to The Guardian. Nobody ever said that online child protection is simple - especially at any level beyond the household, and it isn't even simple there!

Snapshot: Online safety in US homes

A third of US parents are not concerned about their children's online safety, according to a nationwide survey for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The study, conducted by marketing services firm ADVO, Inc., found that 40% of parents (whose children under 18 use the Internet) are "very concerned," 28% "somewhat concerned," but - interestingly - the number of unconcerned parents is up significantly, from 20% to 33% over the past year. Parents have absorbed one cardinal online-safety rule, apparently: More than 80% of households have the connected computer located in a shared space (rather than in child's bedroom or other place where parents are less aware of kids' online activities). For further findings, please click to this week's SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter.

Beware Harry Potter worm!

Tell any Harry Potter fans at your house not to open any Potter-related attachments in emails from people they don't know. A computer worm that was thought to have been long gone has made a comeback with Harry's help,

ZDNet UK reports . UK software company Sophos reported that "infections by the three-month-old 'P' variant of Netsky have risen dramatically over the past week, thanks to the worm's ability to disguise itself as a Harry Potter game or book." The latest Harry Potter film opened in Britain earlier this week and opens today in the US.

'Friends with benefits'

It's unsettling but important reading, this week's look inside "the [US's] under-age sexual revolution, where causal sex is common, online ratings are scrutinized, everybody wants to be so detached, and boys still get what they want on Saturday night" in the New York Times Magazine. Here are some observations writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis makes just about the role the Internet plays in this "revolution":

• Teens flirt online first, then decide whether to continue in "real life."
  
  
  
• They spend a lot of time in sites like FaceTheJury.com (1.2 million members), HotorNot.com (4.3m members), and buddyPic.com, rating each other, updating their profiles, chatting, "asking the questions they might not dare to in real life," and deciding whether or not to "hook up" (for no-strings sex) with someone local they meet in the site.
  
  
• Cell phones and the Net offer teenagers "an unparalleled level of privacy, making hooking up that much easier...."
  
  
• A teenage boy says, "Who needs the hassle of dating when I've got online porn?"
  
  
  
• The Internet has made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way "most of straight society assumes gay men act."

This is a thoughtful piece, with plenty of anecdotal material, some statistics, and historical context, finding some parallels between this generation and teenagers in the 1930s and '40s. It addresses gender questions, and factors in feminism, the abstinence movement, the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, perceptions about marriage, and other influences on teenagers' social lives. As for the rating Web sites teens reportedly flock to, here's another Times article focused just on them, the most innocuous of which is HotorNot.com. Some are more cruel than others, one psychiatrist told the times, adding that these sites feed on the narcissism increasingly pervading US culture.

Net blamed in Tokyo school killing

In Japanese society's search for answers in the killing of a 12-year-old girl by a classmate, "Japanese media have turned to the Internet as a culprit," Reuters reports. It cites Japanese media coverage as saying the 11-year-old girl who confessed to the murder told police that she'd asked the victim not to post messages about her appearance on an online discussion board, but "her friend had refused to stop." Reuters also quotes Hosei University media studies Prof. Tatsuo Inamasu as saying that, though it can be a factor in escalating emotional reactions, the Internet can't be blamed for a murder. He suggested that parents and teachers tend to blame technology because they don't understand it, but a great factor is "the inability to communicate skillfully with another human being." He pointed to the extra care needed when communicating online, without the benefit of seeing the face and body language of the person receiving the message. Reuters adds that the Net is part of everyday life for Japanese children - over 60% of children 6-12 use the Internet. As for this week's tragedy, the 11-year-old girl "will appear before a family court, which could send her to a special reformatory. Children under 14 cannot be prosecuted in Japan." [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this story out.]

Credit card firm drops online porn business

Porn doesn't pay, apparently, at least for one e-commerce company. Citing business reasons, Colorado-based Cardservice International announced it was dropping all of its online adult industry clients, Web Host News reports. The company processes "more than $12 billion in annual credit card volume with more than 125 million transactions annually in 140 languages."

A teenager & the tool of anonymity

If this weren't a story told by a wire service, picked up by news outlets in other countries, it would be hard to believe. But it's the true story of a 14-year-old boy, "Boy B," attempting suicide by inventing a case for his own murder in online chat. The self-created victim used the anonymity of the Internet to create and pose as various participants in an elaborate story that persuaded a 16-year-old boy to attempt his murder. "The older teenager was eventually persuaded that he had been recruited by the British Secret Service to kill Boy B, after which he would be rewarded with a job as well as a sexual relationship with [a] 39-year-old female 'spy'. In June last year, Boy A carried out his 'orders' and stabbed his online friend - who, he had also been told, was suffering from a cancerous tumor," he told the court, according to Agence France-Press. The would-be victim did not die, and police investigating the case pieced the story together from "56,000 lines of computer chatroom text between Boy A and his various real and invented correspondents." The police told AFP they didn't know why Boy B wanted to die. As for sentencing, "Boy A was given a two-year supervision order ... after pleading guilty to attempted murder." Boy B will receive three years' supervision for "for perverting the course of justice and incitement to murder" and may not use online chat.

IM has grown up

All you parents out there know that instant messaging isn't just text anymore, right? It's games, bots, videos, photo-swapping, tune-sharing, ringtones, individually customized "skins," etc. All of which makes it really attractive to kids and therefore yet another thing on which parents need to be up to speed. The BBC recently published an update on some of this, including a little history on this phenomenon that started in Israel in 1996 (with ICQ, bought by AOL in '98 for nearly $300 million) and has grown to pandemic proportions. With IM-forwarding to cell phones now, it will really take off in Europe and Asia, where text-messaging, or SMS, on mobile phones is way ahead of North America. The BBC's numbers are limited, but 2 billion messages a day on AOL's service and 19 million users of Yahoo Instant Messenger in the US alone give you a feel for IM's popularity. But parents also need to know that all these additional, kid-friendly features come with PC security risks - viruses, spyware, porn "spim" (IM spam), and strangers on buddy lists. Text, audio, still images, and video also use different ports, or access points into the family, so it's good for parents and kids to configure the IM software program's Preferences together - or at least talk about how aware everyone is of the risks (to kids and computers) that can be associated with instant-messaging. As a talking point and for some great perspective on all this, here's "Instant messaging risks and tips" from a tech-literate father of six.