Uncle Sam's PCs hijacked

Families who've had their computers infected by some worm and then hijacked by spammers needn't feel embarrassed. So has the US government. "Hundreds of powerful computers at the Defense Department and US Senate were hijacked by hackers who used them to send spam e-mail," USAToday reports, referring to hackers' practice of turning unprotected PCs into "zombies" and zombie networks for the purposes of spamming (to make money) or mounting denial-of-service attacks (to shut down important Web sites and services). The government's problem was uncovered during the Justice Department's recent crackdown on cybercrime, as reported by many media outlets, including the Washington Post (see also "Anti-P2P momentum" in last week's issue). For more on PC hijacking and what to do about it, see "What if our PC's a zombie?!," "1 very illegal summer job," and "How spammers distributed porn."

Fresh Apples

How appropriate that Apple should unveil its slim, chic G5 iMac in Paris. Apple's calling it "the world's thinnest desktop computer," because it "tucks all of its components, including its hard drive, processor and DVD drive, behind a wide-screen [17- or 20-inch] liquid-crystal [LCD] display," CNET reports. The $1,299 (base price) computer is about 2 inches thick (see photo at CNET). It was designed by Apple's iPod folk. Here's the Washington Post's roundup of G5 coverage and Apple's own page about it. For the techies among us, this skinny little computer has a G5, 1.6GHz processor (IBM's PowerPC 970); Mac OSX v. 10.3; 256MB of RAM; an 80GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive; a combination CD-burner/DVD-ROM drive; Nvidia's GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics chip; and 64MB of dedicated graphics memory (don't ask me to explain all of that). The $1,499 and $1,899 models have more, of course (the priciest one a 20" screen).

Even kids can be 'phishers'

Parents might want to know that it's so easy to become an online scam artist now that some of our tech-literate kids could be tempted to try it just for fun. CNET reports that these kits contain "all the graphics, Web code, and text required to construct the kind of bogus Web sites used in Internet phishing scams." The sites will have "the same look and feel as legitimate online banking sites," so people can be tricked into revealing personal financial information to someone posing as their bank. [It's happening to a lot of people. The US Justice Department last week announced more than 100 arrests of online scammers who've affected more than 150,000 victims, PC World reported.] Many of the "phishing" kits also contain software that turns computers into spamming machines. So, if not a scammer, your kid can also become a spammer!



Here are tips from the Anti-Phishing Working Group on "How to Avoid Phishing Scams" and "What to Do If You've Given Out Your Personal Financial Information."

Family PC back-ups a must

It has never been more important - with new viruses emerging all the time, kids downloading all sorts of stuff, and hackers constantly finding new flaws in Windows. Say you've just returned from a wonderful family trip, put all the photos on your PC, erased your digital camera's card, and suddenly the hard drive implodes. Or the IRS audit guy decided to take up residence at your dining room table, and all your tax records were in Quicken on the PC that just got infected with a killer worm. See what I mean?



Fortunately, backing up is easy, and can be completely mindless after the first set-up (which simply requires picking the folders on the hard drive that need the back-ups). I use an online back-up service, which automates the process (every night between about 1 and 6 am). "The most common approach today is to back up the critical data files to a [writable] CD," says PlumChoice CEO Ted Werth. "I recommend backing up every other week if you have a reasonable amount of data changes or additions," e.g., new photos or revised resumes. Backing up to a CD can be automated by software like BackUpMyPC or Norton Ghost). "If you have important data and cannot bring yourself to be disciplined about the CD back-ups, the next best approach is the online back-up solution." An example is Backup.com (see Google for more such services). Please check out my newsletter this week for more on this.

Anti-P2P momentum

The entertainment industry's anti-file-sharing effort is gaining support in government. In addition to RIAA lawsuits and colleges' incentives (see "P2P deterrents, incentives" in this week's issue), there is increasing activity on Capitol Hill and in the Justice Department (DOJ). First, there's the INDUCE Act, introduced this summer by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah and Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. Its passage was thought inprobable just a short time ago, but now the legislation has nine co-sponsors from both parties, Wired News reports, among them "two of Congress' most influential members: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R) of Tennessee and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D) of South Dakota." Then there's the DOJ's summer crackdown on massive distribution of videos, music, and software via peer-to-peer networks, covered in the Washington Post) and many other media outlets. File-sharing was only part of the DOJ's "largest dragnet yet" against "cyber criminals," including "spammers, so-called 'phishers' and other Internet con artists," the Post reports in another article.

Self-published child porn

The term is chilling, but it's happening and parents need to know about it: teens sending their peers sexually explicit images of themselves and later finding them widely distributed on the Net. An example cited in the New York Times yesterday: an 8th-grade girl in the Bronx sending "a digital video of herself masturbating to a male classmate on whom she had a crush." The video "quickly appeared on a file-sharing network that teenagers use to trade music. Hundreds of New York private school students saw the video, in which the girl's face is clearly visible." But we all know this, right?: It doesn't stop with hundreds of local students. On file-sharing networks the video becomes "available to a worldwide audience of millions." It's downloaded onto those file-sharers' computer hard drives, to be shared whenever requested by other P2P network users around the world. It cannot be removed from the Net. Teens may already be aware of scary incidents like this. We hope. But it's unlikely they're telling their parents. So you heard it here and in the New York Times, if you read far enough down in Amy Harmon's thorough article on the growing cyber-bullying problem. Greater public awareness is needed, and experts are working on information for parents dealing with problems like this. I'll keep you posted on what's emerging. Meanwhile, if anyone you know has been confronted with situations like the ones in Amy's article, email me anytime. What they've learned may be helpful to other parents and teenagers.

Online safety: Filters or laws?

Now that the Internet's "the gateway to both the richest and the raunchiest of human expression," is legislation or filtering a better way to protect children? This Scripps Howard article does a good job of framing the debate that has tied US courts up in knots for years. The bottom line for parents is that - though filtering is undeniably flawed - it's better than nothing if you need a little help in keeping kids from seeking out the worst of the Web (if they obey a family rule to use only filtered search engines, they're not very likely to stumble on it - see "Searching with 'Mamma'" for safe-search examples). And for filtering software options and views, see "NetNanny failed" and my April 9 issue.

P2P deterrents, incentives

University students are probably among the 744 file-sharers targeted in this latest round from the RIAA, and universities are working on ways to keep them out of the fray. In addition to the 744, the RIAA (record company trade assoc.) is also suing 152 who have declined to settle out of court, The Register reports, making the total 896 and the grand total around 4,000. Meanwhile, more than 20 US colleges and universities are now providing legal music-downloading services and some two dozen more have deals with Napster and other providers in the works, reports Wired News, citing a just-released report from a coalition of universities and entertainment companies. And not only record companies are happy. Free downloading has become an attraction students look for in choosing schools, USAToday reports. "Penn State struck the first deal with Napster in January. The trial program was so successful that many other schools took notice. Now, when students return to school ... they'll find free, legal digital music as the latest amenity, alongside cable TV and campus concerts." Hmm, then there's the academic part!

Oz: Alleged student hate site

It's every school's nightmare these days: a hate site published by students about their teachers. A state education department in Australia will be investigating issues surrounding a site that "called for teachers to be executed, burnt or sent to 'Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.'It also called some teachers 'child molesters'," Australian IT reports. The site, alleged to have been created by high school students, was online for about three days in July before it was shut down. The New South Wales Education Department will review the suburban Sydney school's operations, its management, academic results, student welfare, inappropriate use of the Internet, and discipline.

'Don't talk to strangers': Doesn't work

What parents hear about the unthinkable - online child molestation - is not really accurate. A new study paints a very different picture from "predators who impersonate peers to befriend children and lure them into encounters that end in abduction, rape and murder," according to a study done for the American Psychological Association. The study, by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, found that "most offenders did not deceive victims about the fact that they were adults interested in sexual relationships"; "the victims, primarily teens 13-15, met and had sex with the adults on more than one occasion"; "half of the victims were described as being in love with or feeling close bonds with the offenders"; "few offenders abducted or used force to sexually abuse their victims." In other words, these young people who are curious, fearless, and naive think their abusers are friends and - because of the Internet's anonymity - they often get too far in an online relationship to back down before the abuse occurs. Or they are "sexually liberated" and have decided they don't care. For more on this research and working with online kids, see my interview with Janis Wolak, one of the study's researchers and a Net-literate mom herself, covered in last June's "Rethinking 'stranger danger'," Part 1 and Part 2.

What's music coming to?

Apple's iTunes is just about to have a new 800-pound gorilla of a competitor, and it may be sign of things to come for music fans in every household. "Microsoft plans to quietly launch the MSN online music store with the new version of its Windows Media 10 player," the San Jose Mercury News reports. Some 130 million PC owners will be introduced to the store, MS says, when they're prompted to update their media player software. "That's not counting the 300 million people who drop by the MSN site. The software giant also touts the music store's compatibility with nearly 60 digital music players. Not included in the list is Apple's popular iPod." The Windows Media system will use MS's new "Janus" digital rights management (DRM) technology, and it's Janus that gives us a window on what consuming music could be like in the future. In a commentary, The Register suggests Janus is all about control. "Janus was the Roman god of doors, and had two faces.... Janus here faces two ways, smiling warmly and solicitously at the content owners and vendors, and somewhat less convincingly at the consumer." On the one hand, Janus is designed to make the music subscription services like Napster work better with people's MP3 players (to the music industry, that probably spells less use of the free file-sharing services).



On the other hand, it also potentially reduces music fans' freedom. "Imagine," The Register continues, "a world where the flexibility of being able to buy a CD then play it where you like had been finally stamped out, where it was becoming 'illegitimate' to let your friends hear stuff you think they might be interested in, and where 'home taping' was getting progressively harder. And imagine a world where there was no online equivalent of the 'buy, rip, play where you like' model that's currently available to you. And sure, in that world people won't be able to grab whatever they want without paying for it from file-sharing networks.... It enables a New World Order where the content companies can impose a significantly more restrictive regime on consumers without negotiation." There are alternatives, The Register points out in a footnote worth noting.

Help for family laptop shoppers

Shopping for a family or student laptop? There's help in the Washington Post's "2004 Laptop Guide." Interestingly, Apple's iBook G4 won in the price department and got the silver medal for weight (beaten by Gateway's 200X by just 0.6 of a pound). Do I sound like I've been watching the Olympics a lot? Seriously, I always thought of Apples as pricey, compared to PCs, so this was pleasant news (my family is agnostic - we have both an iBook and a couple of PCs and like them all). The iBook's a little light on memory, but long on battery life. Five laptops were compared by the Post's Rob Pegararo, and Rob is good about factoring in family (not just workplace) interests, so this guide's worth a look if you're in the market.

IM-ers get 'spim'

More than 580 billion instant messages were sent last year. An estimated 400 million of them were "spim" (the IM version of spam, or unsolicited junk mail). This year the spim figure is expected to be 1.2 billion, according to research cited by the BBC. Instant-messaging is very easy for spimmers and believed to be more effective and more lucrative than spam because there's a higher expectation (or gullibility) among receivers that the message can be trusted. Which is why "there are fears that some people may be taken in by the spim messages because they think they are being directed to certain Web sites by people they know." This might be of concern to parents concerned about kids' exposure to porn. The good news is that there's an extra step with IM. Whereas an email can contain graphic images, with IM, a receiver has to click to the sexually explicit Web page. A BBC source recommends three tips, and we would add a fourth: Don't accept messages from strangers; don't download attachments from strangers; and keep all your PC security software up-to-date (anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, and Microsoft updates). Parents might also want to go through IM Preferences with their kids, weed strangers out of Buddy Lists and block anyone not on it. For details, see "IM Risks & Tips" from a dad and PC security company CEO in my 1/16 issue.

Beware strange site

It could look like a game to a child. So parents need to be aware of this new "drag-and-drop" security flaw in Windows XP that even the giant new security patch, SP2, doesn't take care of. What kids should be alert to is any effort (such as an email) to get them to go to a strange-looking Web page containing just two lines and an image. The page might tell the visitor to drag the picture across the two lines and drop it, CNET reports. What's actually happening, security experts told CNET, is a malicious program being dragged into a folder on your PC. Next time you restart the computer, the program runs and takes control of it. Secunia, the PC security company that discovered the flaw, said the program could be simplified to require a single click, not even the drag-and-drop exercise. All your kids need to know is not to go to a Web site that someone they don't know has told them to visit, and certainly not to play around on it. It's best not to open spam or strange emails at all, much less click to the Web from them. And tell them to be careful about going to Web sites from instant messages too. Also, just keep your Windows security up-to-date at this page. Microsoft surely will issue a patch for this "vulnerability." Secunia has given this flaw a "highly critical" rating.

Child's IM lose, parent's nightmare

Daughter returns from summer camp eager to IM with her much missed new-found friends. She announces "I can't IM." This is not good news. There is, in fact, a great deal more that suddenly can't be done on the family PC, including Mom's professional work, reports parent and Washington Post reporter Kathleen Day. Kathleen proceeds to spend "$800 and roughly 48 man-hours over nearly three weeks" to fix the family computer.



What would have been the No. 1 preventive measure? Installing a firewall before switching from a modem to a high-speed Internet connection (they already had anti-virus software installed). Over half of home Net users in the US now have high-speed connections, PC World reports, so if your home's one of them, I hope you haven't learned this important preventive measure the way Kathleen's family did - the hard way. The need for a firewall can't be stressed enough. Kathleen's fun-to-read article mentions several products, including the free version of Zone Alarm that she picked (another free one is Agnitum's). Please see my newsletter this week for more tips and links that can keep ordeals like Kathleen's at bay.

Korea & Oz: Porn-blocking moves

The Korean government this week announced a passel of measures it will be taking to protect children and teens in cyberspace, the Korea Times reports. Some of those measures will be laws requiring ISPs to be "juvenile protectors" and regulating advertising; funding new filtering technology for the Web and P2P networks; monitoring "cyber communities, including those for suicide"; and designating "cyber clean schools" where cyberethics will be taught.



In Australia, the Labor Party is talking about tougher regulations to protect online kids, Australian IT reports. Under such regs, all ISPs "would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers.... A confidential paper from the left-wing think tank the Australia Institute, which is now being considered by the Opposition Leader's office, proposes that ISPs install compulsory filtering programs so only adults who can verify their age could view X-rated material." This activity follows the launch of Cleanfeed in the UK, filtering technology used by that country's largest ISP, BT, to block child porn from all of its household customers (see VNUNET). Fueling the debate over tougher measures in Oz was the release of a study there which found that "pornography is good for people," Australian IT reports in a separate article.

Class discussion by blog

Move over student gossip blogs and online diaries, make way for classroom blogs. Blogs are everywhere in the news these days, but this is new (to me, anyway): teachers' blogs for class discussion and announcements, which make total sense. For example, Mrs. Dudiak's second-grade class in Frederick County, Md., didn't have time for a full-blown class discussion on the previous day's field trip to a Native American farm, which was all her students wanted to talk about, so she had them "talk" about it in their classroom Web log, the New York Times reports. In other classroom blogs, many of which got started in the past school year, students "write about how they attacked a tough math problem, post observations about their science experiments or display their latest art projects."

NetNanny failed...

...a Wall Street Journal columnist's test of filtering software. After MSN and AOL's parental controls, tech columnist Walt Mossberg and his assistant Katie Boehret favored FilterLogix. "In our tests, CyberPatrol and FilterLogix did the best job of weeding out bad sites, though we preferred FilterLogix, because it required the least tweaking [they're smart - that's important to parents]. Net Nanny failed to block some blatantly inappropriate Web pages, so we can't recommend it." But they only looked at three filters (by installing them on three computers and trying "to call up as many revolting Web sites as possible"). Testing filtering software and services is a huge headache, probably one reason why Consumer Reports does it so seldom and even PC Magazine does it only annually. Net Family News doesn't have the resources to test software, but here are two new options that I've written about this year, including one specifically for families with high-speed connections. PC Magazine tested eight other products this summer, and its top pick was CyberSitter 9.0. For the tougher job of IM filtering, PC Magazine mentions SurfControl's product in an earlier article (most filtering products simply allow parents to turn instant messaging and file-sharing off altogether).

Cell-phone scatter-brains

"We were celebrating summer freedom from school," writes a parent and psychology professor commenting in the Christian Science Monitor. "The kids rode waves for hours, skim-boarded on the beach, played football, and hiked the rock cliffs to watch the sunset. Another mom and I organized a cookout just after dark. What could be better? Well, apparently something could be. Our trip was constantly punctuated by outgoing cellphone calls. At all times, at least one of the 10 boys was on his cellphone.... The boys were calling friends elsewhere just to see 'what's happening'." It's happening in schools too. The New York Times calls it "gadget distraction" in an article about how teachers are dealing with kids' gadget multitasking in school, where creative teachers are fighting tech with tech (or distraction with distraction). For example, teacher-designed computer games, threats of reboots (students lose their work if they drift off into IM-ing), online work groups, stealth (classroom monitors walking around, looking at students' screens), network management (taking over kids' computers whenever needed), and creative seating configuration. But back on the beach, a thoughtful mom's observation about digital multitasking gives pause to fellow parents: "The appearance of obsessive busyness seems ironically linked to ultimate emptiness."

File-sharing milestone

Even kids - those who use Kazaa or BitStream, anyway - will be interested in this case. It pitted dozens of huge media companies against two small software companies (and the millions of file-sharers that use their services, Grokster and Morpheus). In a unanimous decision, a US federal court in California ruled Thursday that Grokster, Morpheus, and other P2P services, can't be held liable for the copyright violations of their users. The decision was similar to a milestone decision in 1984 that said VCR makers were not to be held liable for infringements of their customers. An appeal to the Supreme Court is likely, says the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which argued on behalf of the P2P defendants in the case. Here's the EFF's press release and here's MGM v. Grokster.

Update on MS's big PC patch

Families know that nothing's perfect in the world of PC security - meaning, the intrepid young Web surfers in our homes can download anything. Meanwhile, intrepid hackers of the malicious sort are constantly finding ways to hack into Microsoft software (because it has the lionshare of computer users). So it was inevitable that Microsoft's milestone security patch, SP2 (for "Service Pack 2"), would have flaws found in it about as soon as it was released. Here are the latest findings from a couple of sources: CNET reports that PC security researchers, having found flaws that hackers can exploit, have already notified Microsoft about them, and they expect to find more. Today's headline on Wall Street Journal techie Walt Mossberg's column has it that SP2 "has value but falls short." That's the upshot, it seems, no matter how many flaws are found: better to have it on your PC than not.

A parent's college-shopping

Michelle Slatalla is just fun to read, partly because she's a fellow parent, I guess, plus she's very down-to-earth and a great writer. In her Online Shopper column this week (in the New York Times), she's shopping for colleges for her daughter - early. "It started with one of those sinking feelings of parental panic. Mine occurred at a cocktail party, where the conversations made it clear that while I had been worrying about whether to thaw leftover chili or spaghetti sauce, savvier parents had been homing in on the strategies of SAT prep classes, math tutors and books that claimed to know the secrets of the 50 best small liberal arts colleges in America. As a parent of two teenagers, I don't need more panic. So what if my daughter won't graduate until 2007? I went home and started shopping online for a college." Michelle provides the URLs of some great sites for college (and university) Web research - with guides to everything from SAT-prep services to college counseling companies to financial aid.

Teens breaking up online

The Pew Internet & American Life project first chronicled teens breaking off relationships via IM back in 2001 (when the US had a mere 17 million Net users aged 12-17, and 17% of them had used IMs to ask someone out, 13% to break up with someone - see my 6/29/01 issue). Now there's advice for teens who've been rejected online (harder, they say, than a real-life rejection) and a rejection service, papernapkin.net, Wired News reports. Trish McDermott, vice president of romance at Match.com, told the Christian Science Monitor last spring that 48% of online daters say they have experienced an email breakup. This might be a good family discussion topic. My kids aren't dating yet, but someday I'll ask them if they've gotten an impersonal, nonverbal rejection and, if so, how they've dealt with that. And we'll probably talk about the ethics of letting someone down without the courtesy of eye contact. It's an interesting new challenge that the Internet has presented both teens and parents.

Free iPods?!

Your kids may come to you starry-eyed about FreeiPods.com. Don't worry - according to Wired News, it's not a scam, but rather a "customer acquisition" program. As Wired puts it, advertisers have discovered "it's more effective to spend $50 million on gifts than to blow

the cash on TV ads." In this case, people get free iPod minis for choosing and participating in one of 10 different free trials such as 45 days of AOL or 2 weeks of genealogy research at Ancestry.com. The company that sends out the iPods is Gratis Internet, which gets paid for sending potential customers to the likes of AOL, eBay, or RealNetworks. Gratis told Wired News that since it launched FreeiPods.com in June, it has shipped 2,500 of the little MP3 players.

Microsoft's big patch & family PCs

Since Microsoft's releasing SP2, its major PC security patch for Windows XP, today, many families might wonder, "Should we download it?" (Of course some of your PCs are set to download MS updates automatically, so you'll suddenly have it at some point.) The simplest answer seems to be yes, but there aren't really any simple answers in the world of computers. The Washington Post's tech columnist Rob Pegararo likens our PCs to a little country house (with window and door locks not working and a key under the doormat) transported to a very urban setting where security is suddenly an issue. Basically, we need this higher level of security. Fortunately, Rob thoroughly tested SP2 and concluded that it's "a must for XP users," including families. Here's the transcript of a helpful online discussion he had with household users all over the country who might have questions like yours and mine.



But you should also know that SP2 is not perfect. So far it has a number of conflicts with software that may already be on your system. CNET reported 47, though 40 mostly affect business users; seven affect games (your kids probably already know about them!). Here's a list from the Washington Post of software conflicts parents and kids may care about a lot: Zone Labs's Zone Alarm firewall, McAfee Virus Scan, Yahoo Messenger, Real Player, Kazaa, MusicMatch Jukebox, Microsoft Outlook 2002, and 2003 and Adobe's Photoshop Elements. Here's Microsoft's page devoted to these conflicts and its page on how to deal with them.

Summer spam: More porn

The amount of porn-touting spam in our in-boxes has risen 350% since June, The Register reports. That number's from email security company Clearswift. Porn spam requires special vigilance because - besides kids' exposure to inappropriate content - porn email is also "a popular carrier for malicious code." Just another reminder to kids and parents not to click on any links in these emails or download any attachments they carry. For balance, here's where porn, "a relatively small slice of the spam pie," lines up with other spam: "Financial spam accounts for 39% of the rubbish clogging our in-boxes," the Register adds, with healthcare a close second (30%). "Porn accounts for just under 5%."

Blogs' downside

I'm showing my age and parental bias, but to me the story of 20-something x-rated blogger Jessica Cutler is a good example of how blogging with your friends can go very wrong. For Jessica, the Washington Post reports, having her blog found out by boyfriends and, eventually, clients on Capitol Hill was bad news (getting fired, losing a lover) and good news (a Playboy pictorial this fall and a six-figure book contract). But for the many teenagers who get publicly personal on their blogs but who don't mix it up with people in powerful places, blog "secrets" won't make them rich and may be discovered by future admissions directors, prospective employers, etc. Kids usually either don't think about the consequences of telling all in online journals/blogs or choose not to. The problem is, with the Internet, the consequences are often impossible to delete - ever. That's why I feel it's imperative that parents at least know if their children have online journals and maybe even know what's posted in them. It could lead to some valuable discussion on ethical online behavior and your family's values, as well as on protecting what people will be able to turn up about your children in search engines way into the future. For more on teen blogs, see "Daugher's blog, mom's dilemma", "Teens' blog life" in my 1/16 issue and "Understanding blogs" in my 2/7/03 issue. Don't miss the Post piece's fascinating comments about how the sexual revolution is looking these days - e.g., how "stripped of its feminist political ideology," it "has left legions of young women free but confused."

Tech appeal to young voters

The goal of Rock the Vote, MTV's non-partisan partner, is to get 20 million 18-to-24-year-olds to the polls this US presidential election year, and it figures technology can only help. First it reached people via mobile phones (see RTV Mobile and its Mobile Photo Blog, which covered the Democratic National Convention last month). Now it's IM. According to Wired News, RTV is using Rock the Vote-branded IM software that will allow users of the largest IM services (AIM, Yahoo, MSN) to communicate with each other. It's mobilizing "thousands of 'street team' volunteers" who will use "search tools built into the IM client to identify and add to their buddy lists young voters they've met at ... Rock the Vote events - concerts, college appearances, meet-ups and the like - who have also downloaded the client. Once that's done, the street team will engage those buddies in regular political discussions and encourage them to reach out to their own friends to talk politics as well." As an incentive, as Election Day approaches, RTV's celebrity partners will join in the IM discussions.

Student-eye-view of P2P

University students may be changing their downloading habits but not their mindsets, according to the California Aggie, news site of the University of California, Davis. One freshman stopped downloading at school for fear of repercussions but said she continues file-sharing at home; another student "said he downloads without regard for copyrights to 'stick it to the man'." Still, the number of "illegal downloading" cases in the 2002-'03 school year was 240, last year 94, possibly out of fear of recording industry (RIAA) lawsuits, possibly because of UC Davis's policy: "For a first offense, a student's Internet port [access] is shut off for up to a month. For a second offense, the port is shut down for the remainder of the year." University officials hope they'll never have to deal with a 3-time offender - they're "stuck between trying to protect student privacy and stopping illegal activities involving campus Internet services." Meanwhile, the Pew Internet & American Life project found that 14% of the 128 million American adults now online say they downloaded music at one time but no longer do so. About a third of these say the RIAA's tactics are the reason they stopped downloading music. Pew also surveyed musicians on file-sharing and found no clear consensus among them.

Bullying chat shut down

A UK teen online community was shut down because of allegations that it was being used by bullies to victimize children, The Register reports. Mouth2mouth.tk, "which claims to be the 'largest online teen community' in North London and Hertfordshire ... contained death threats and racist comments, according to anti-bullying charity, Bullying Online. The organization had received complaints from kids and parents about the discussion board, so its director, Liz Carnell, The Register reports, spent most of last weekend trying to persuade the bullies on Mouth2Mouth that their abusive comments could "tip someone over the edge into suicide" and "were cowardly as none of the posters gave their names." Mouth2Mouth later posted a notice saying the community had been shut down "pending further notice." For more on this, see "The growing 'cyberbullying' problem" in my newsletter.

AOL's low-cost connecting

Starting this month America Online will help low-income and minority households get connected by selling low-cost PCs with a year of dial-up Net service, Reuters reports. AOL says it hopes to attract the 27% of US homes comprised of seniors, African Americans, and Hispanics who don't own a computer. Reuters cites AOL figures showing that, with 2 million members, the ISP's Latino service, launched last October, is a leading online service provider for the US Spanish-speaking community. AOL will launch Blackvoices next month. The new connected-PC package will be sold at Office Depot stores.

19-year-old worm writer

Jeffrey Parson pleaded guilty in a federal court in Seattle to creating a variant of the MS Blaster worm, Australian IT reports. The Minnesota teenager "admitted to intentionally causing and attempting to cause damage to a protected computer by authoring and spreading a version of the worm that spread rapidly on the internet, clogging computer networks, including Australian ones." He faces 18 months to three years in jail and potential fines.

Net & everyday US life

The Internet may be a little more than icing to Americans' everyday lives, but it hasn't changed the cake. In a major multi-year study, the Pew Internet & American Live project found that "the vast majority of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines and that the rhythm of their everyday lives would be affected if they could no longer go online. Yet, despite its great popularity and allure, the Internet still plays second fiddle to old-fashioned habits." Some key findings: "88% of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines. Of those, one-third say it plays a major role, and two-thirds say it plays a minor role. The activities they identified as most significant are communicating with family and friends and finding a wealth of information at their fingertips." Here's coverage from the San Jose Mercury News and MSNBC.

'Drive-by downloads'

This is something all parents of busy young Web surfers should know about. "Drive-by downloads" are nasty little programs people inadvertently download to their computers just by going to some not-so-well-meaning Web sites. The Washington Post's "Computer Guy" does a great job of explaining what can be done about them (they are largely an Internet Explorer problem, so users of other browsers can ignore this post).

3rd & 4th graders on cybersafety

Most of the third- and fourth-graders at Deer Park Elementary have a Net-connected computer at home, but "only 39% of the third-graders and 43% of the fourth-graders are required to ask their parents' permission before using their home computer," according to a survey conducted by the Washington, D.C., area school. Teacher Diane Painter reports in TechLearning.com that Deer Park celebrates Computer Learning Month each October by working with its students on "Cyber Safety and Ethics Awareness issues" and this summer surveyed its 3rd- and 4th-graders to find out how much they knew already. The study is a helpful look - for parents and teachers - at what parents and kids should know and at the excellent tech- and media-literacy work being done at some schools. In a few other findings, one-third of the 3rd- and 4th-graders have their own email accounts; less than 15% said they go into chat rooms, but by 4th grade, about 25% engage in instant-messaging; 39% of 3rd-graders and 63% of 4th-graders said they talk about Net safety at home. [On chat rooms, a police officer told a Deer Park school assembly that, while most crimes in their school district were on the decline, cyber crimes went up in Fairfax County, Va., "450% from 2001 to 2002. Many of these crimes were directly related to chat room use."] There are helpful tips for parents under "Safety Clicks Assembly" in this report, and don't miss the "Third Grade Cyber Safety Cartoons."

Families, look for AIM update!

This is for AIM users and their parents (a whole lot of teenagers use AOL instant-messaging!): Look for a critical update that AOL will be releasing very soon. A vulnerability in AIM has been discovered which "could allow a malicious hacker to use the 'Away Message' feature to take control of a user's machine," Internet.com reports. AOL says a hacker could take over an AIM user's PC only if "a user actively clicks on a URL in an instant message conversation," which is always a bit risky.

The 'pirate generation'

The Business Software Alliance says that the younger people are "the more likely they are to own and use pirated goods" such as software, CDs, and DVDs, the BBC reports. The article cites fresh BSA research finding a "growing disrespect" for copyrights, with nearly half of UK 18-to-29-year-olds owning pirated or counterfeit goods. The study found that 17% of people over 50 own pirated goods, compared to 44% of people 18-29, and 28% of 18-to-29-year-olds "did not even consider copyright laws before they bought such goods.

Free virus protection?

Many families have this question: Must we pay a yearly subscription for decent protection from viruses, worms, etc.? The basic answer from New York Times tech guy J.D. Biersdorfer seems to be, "you get what you pay for." He names some free anti-virus programs, but this is key: "You may find better technical support and a wider array of features in some of the antivirus programs designed specifically for home users."

Disney PC for kids

The "Disney Dream Desk PC" will cost $599 (plus $299 more for the monitor) and be available at CompUSA stores and Disney's Web site starting September 11, the Associated Press reports. Web and email filtering from a company called ContentProtect will be bundled with it, along with software that "allows users to combine their own video clips with Disney characters and sound effects and create drawings using a built-in digital pen." Of course the Windows PC (made by a private label company in Germany called Medion AG) will also play Disney CDs and DVDs and will combine. Soon there will also be a Disney digital camera and camcorder, according to the AP.

Spam: How some people cope

Some have given up on filters because, with them, they lose important messages. Others have just about given up on email altogether. But some depend on it too much and simply can't do without the technology, spam or no, the New York Times reports. My friend Jean, who's quoted in the piece, is in that last group, because - as Net-mom - she answers a lot of people's questions about the Net. And Jean's quite happy with the new Bayesian filtering used by the latest versions of Eudora email software. Good filtering just takes a bit of work. Jean gets about 900 junk emails/spams a day, and she's grateful Eudora filters the bulk of it out, but she still has to go through the junk folder every few days to make sure she doesn't trash anything important. A key point is that she's in control - she sets the level of restrictiveness and can check Eudora's work. Some ISPs do the filtering for you without showing what's been blocked, so you can miss legitimate mail without ever knowing it. I can't really imagine life without email - as the Times puts it, spam is the bathwater; email's the baby. It really helps to hear how people are dealing with the bathwater.



Incidentally, here's a step in the right direction: The giant pharmaceutical Pfizer is taking action against publishers of spam about Viagra, the BBC reports.

Kids swap files, parents sued

The reaction of this mom and dad - Sandy and Richard Nauman of Des Moines, Iowa - to an RIAA lawsuit is far from unusual, we suspect. Sandy said she and her husband had no idea how to download music from the Internet. But, according to the Associated Press, their 15- and 18-year-old kids certainly do. The Naumans are among "a group of

90 named defendants from across the country sued [in federal court] late last month in the latest round of [some 3,500] lawsuits" the RIAA has filed against what it calls music pirates. The settlement could cost the Naumans "up to $4,000," the AP reports. the RIAA says they have downloaded more than 1,000 songs on free file-sharing services (such as eDonkey, Kazaa, or BitTorrent).

Online suicide 'advice'

This might just be a good thing for parents to know about: suicide sites and chatrooms on the Web. The Australian parliament is considering legislation to "make it a criminal offence to use the internet to counsel or incite suicide," Australian IT reports. The legislation "would also cover material which promoted and provided instruction on a particular method of suicide. Possession, production or supply of that material would also be covered." The article refers to the many "easily accessible" sites with instructions for different methods of committing suicide and actual chats in which participants encourage each other to do so.

Latest on home zombie PCs

One person commenting on a BBC piece today likened getting a high-speed Net connection more to getting a driver's license than having cable TV coming into your home. With the latter, you just turn the set on and start consuming; with the former you're only getting the privilege to figure out how to drive safely. Why the metaphors? Because so many families are now getting broadband Net access, many of them without understanding the (PC) security issues involved. Thus figures like this one cited by the BBC: 85% of email leaving broadband-connected homes is now likely to be spam - of course largely unbeknownst to those connected families who are inadvertently sending out that spam. Their PCs have become "zombies" - controlled by others, spam publishers, because the families don't know (or haven't been told by their Internet service providers) that they need firewalls (software like ZoneLabs.com's ZoneAlarm, free for personal use); constantly updated anti-virus software/service (like McAfee's or Symantec's); and timely downloads of Microsoft's ever-more-frequent "critical updates," or PC security patches.



Families' PCs become controlled by others when kids (or parents) mistakenly open attachments that contain "trojan" viruses that open up a "backdoor" and allow outsiders to take over their computers. Less often it's because someone has visited a Web site that sends software code to the PC which similarly takes control. At the bottom of the BBC piece are readers' own experiences with the zombie problem - you might find these helpful, or at least comforting. You're not alone (if you have a zombie on your hands); way too many of us are dealing with this problem. We wish broadband ISPs were doing a better job of informing their new customers about what the "driver's license" they're providing entails - though the BBC points out that ISPs are getting better about this, for the benefit of their own bottom line as much as for their customers. You'll find more on this in "What if our PC's a zombie?"

Canada's Tipline

The fight against online exploitation of children is getting a big boost from the Canadian government and private sector, the Calgary Sun reports. The government pledged to fund cybertip.ca, a program of Child Find Manitoba, $700,000 a year for five years, and Bell Canada has contributed that amount to the tipline to expand its Web site for nationwide coverage by the fall. "Cybertip.ca receives tips regarding Internet incidents of child pornography, luring, child sex-tourism, or child prostitution and forward that information to the appropriate law enforcement agency," according to the Sun. The tipline appears to be modeled after the US's CyberTipline, run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia.