Thursday, September 30, 2004

The IM life of middle-schoolers

"It's almost like, to our kids, IM is an alternate reality," a friend and parent said to me recently. I think he's right, but it seems that way to parents too.



...an alternate reality because kids behave differently when in instant-messaging mode. With fellow instant-messagers they're often more bold, freer to try different behaviors or personas than what they'd do or be in person. With people in the same room, sometimes it's as if we're not even there. When IMing, they're in another space.



This new online part of our children's social lives seems unfathomable to many of us. At least, that's what Amanda, a Net-literate school counselor (and trained social worker) in Salt Lake City, has found. "I was shocked by the shock of the parents. This kind of communication is so new to them that the boundaries are blurred.... They don't know when to put their foot down, so they don't." Last year there was "a kind of explosion" in Net-related issues at Amanda's independent middle school - "it exploded in parents' consciousness," not in kids' instant-messaging, she explained. Amanda has worked through IM issue with a lot of 11-to-13-year-olds and has some helpful ideas for parents and other educators on dealing with this aspect of kids' social lives now blurring the lines between home and school. To read more, click here.

A mom writes: IM impersonations

Just as I was working on this week's feature on the IM life of middle-schoolers, a reader, Betsy in Ohio, emailed me with a question about IM parental controls (which aren't - can't be - provided by the free, public IM services like AIM, ICQ, or Yahoo Messenger). When I replied, she kindly, over several email exchanges, shared her experience with an IM trick a couple of kids close to her had played on peers. Her account echoes important points school counselor Amanda makes in the feature - e.g., about being in touch with other parents and how to work with our kids on this. For Betsy's comments, click here. As you can tell, I welcome comments and often publish them for the benefit of all readers. Please email me at anne@netfamilynews.org.

Digital divide & kids: Fresh look

According to the latest figures available, in the 2003-04 school year, 61% of US 8-to-18-year-olds used the Internet daily, 74% had access at home, and 96% had gone online (experienced the Net at least once). Those figures are from a just-released Kaiser Family Foundation study, "Digital Divide...Where to Go From Here," urging policymakers to refocus on this issue. The 96% figure, encouragingly, showed "no significant differences according to race, parent education, or median income of the community in which the children went to school," the report says, but that's not the most revealing figure where the digital divide's concerned. It's the figures for "have Net access at home" and "use the Net on a typical day" that show us how well we're closing the gap, and the study shows we still have work to do.

Vote 2004: Helping young critical thinkers

Could there be a more "teachable moment" for working with our kids on critical thinking? At least for Americans, at a very polarized point in our political history? Besides the flood of "information" we all face, for young media consumers, "it's not always obvious how to make the leap from a civics lessons involving founding fathers wearing powdered wigs to slick political ads on TV," as Shelley Pasnik puts it. So - just in time - Shelley, creator of The PBS Parents Guide to Children and Media, has just published an article, with links to other Web resources, on working with kids through all the 2004 Election "truths." I think teachers will find this very useful, too, and Shelley's basic points - such as how myths are easier to promote than facts and how soundbites differ from policy - are relevant to parents and educators in any country.

Beware IM virus

This week's was an "early warning" from the Internet Storm Center (ISC, a Net security experts cooperative), but IM users and their parents should be on the alert. The ISC warned that the profiles of AIM users (the personal descriptions users provide which anyone can look up) are vulnerable to malicious hackers, Internet News reports. Basically, they attach virus-infected image files to the profiles, and send an IM to people enticing them to "go to my profile and check out this photo." When the photo's downloaded, the viewer's PC gets infected. Tell your kids not to be fooled by invitations like this especially from anyone they don't know (and they do know not to put any personally identifiable information in their profiles, don't they?!). The BBC calls these images "poisoned pictures." They have already turned up in an older, more techie venue called newsgroups. The BBC notes that only Internet Explorer browser users are vulnerable to this virus.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Congress: After those pirates!

It's up to Congress, US lawmakers apparently feel, to protect the music biz from copyright pirates. Two bills are in the works - the Induce Act in the Senate and the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act in the House of Representatives. This summer, Sen. Orrin Hatch announced that they "must pass legislation this year that would effectively drive online digital music swapping companies out of business," the Washington Post reported. The Induce Act, which the Senate is expected to vote on tomorrow, would allow recording companies and movie studios to sue file-sharing networks like Kazaa or eDonkey for enticing their users to illegally share copyrighted tunes and films. The other bill, passed by the House yesterday, would - if signed into law - make it a crime both to share large numbers of music files on P2P networks and to use video cameras to record films in movie theaters, the Associated Press reports.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Non-stranger danger

"Don't talk to strangers" only confuses kids, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). An article in today's Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reiterates this message that I'm hearing from other expert sources as well (see my 8/27 issue about findings from a University of New Hampshire study on this). The article refers to arrests of fairly reputable people in the Rochester area who have been arrested for child sexual exploitation: a deputy sheriff, a retired Orleans County Court judge, a prominent physician, and a school official. The point is not that they're prominent but that they are not the stereotypical sexual predator - the guy in a trench coat lurking behind a bush near some playground. NCMEC says the danger of sexual predation is greater from someone you or your children know than from a stranger. In a blue column to the right of the article are five tips from the National Center on keeping children safe from sexual exploitation. Parents should also know about the Center's CyberTipline, where incidents of exploitation, online enticement/luring, child pornography, or sexually explicit material sent to children can be reported via a Web form (click on "Report" at CyberTipline.com) or a toll-free number (800.843.5678). You can contact the CyberTipline even if you're worried that a child is being sexually exploited.

Net books for needy kids

There's a wonderful project, Anywhere Books, that's putting books into the hands of children who wouldn't otherwise have them. Using Internet sources such as Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, Anywhere Books's "digital bookmobile" - "a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine, and cutter," Wired News reports - recently visited Gulu, Uganda, for example. It provided books for "children commonly referred to as night commuters," according to Charles Batambuze, a librarian with the sponsoring National Library of Uganda who was in Gulu for the event. "They move from their homes every evening to spend the night in the safety of Gulu town. These children displaced by war together with their teachers and parents attended a children's reading tent event held on 27th-28th March 2004 at Gulu Public School," Charles reported, adding that English is the language of instruction in Ugandan Public Schools. Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland were among the more popular books printed for the Gulu students. Anywhere Books told Wired News that "on average, there is one textbook for every six kids in Uganda."

Monday, September 27, 2004

Legal movies

We covered "Legal music" the other day, but we left out films. Your kids probably already know of these, but USToday brings us up to date on this front with "Download movies from Web can be easy, legal." Columnist Kim Komando names four major film sources, all of which offer trial memberships. Important caveat: Don't try 'em if you don't have a high-speed Net connection. Otherwise, movies take way too long to download.

Friday, September 24, 2004

Check out those game ratings!

Do you have gamers in your family who are already hinting around about a video

game or two on a holiday wish list they'd started compiling last spring? There's help for gamers' parents. Which is good, because - on the advice of Patricia Vance, president of the Entertainment Software Rating Board - we need to check out the ratings on every video game box

- front and back - before buying anything.



"Some parents who may not have played games before are not aware that there are

games made for adults too," Pat told me in a phone interview. Very much for

adults. An online game called Sociolotron includes virtual rape (see my 7/2

issue
). For off-the-shelf video games, the ratings include the "AO" one (for Adults Only) for games that "contain content suitable only for adults" which "may include graphic depictions of sex and/or violence" and "not intended for persons under the age of 18," as explained on the ESRB's Web guide to the rating system

. Even if your child says "everybody

has it," that may be because other parents did check the game's rating and

aren't around when the game's being played. For parents' tips and links to top game-review sites, please click to my main feature this week.

Family P2P policymaking

A software company executive emailed me some concrete comments about the family P2P policy ideas I floated in "Legal music" last week. He wrote:



"For your 'possible P2P policies,' I'd add a third (albeit, I am most certainly NOT impartial): Use a good P2P blocking application and 'override' the restrictions when your child wants to download [legal music], ensuring that you are around to supervise. [He's not impartial because he's developed P2P blocking software, but we agree this is another option parents might consider. Here are the two options I proposed last week.]



"I'd also caution against using Kazaa with solution #1. It is filled with adware and will slow your computer down. Equally concerning, it comes packaged with an application called P2PNetworking.exe. This application opens a port on your computer that is used for file-sharing, even if you are *not* using Kazaa. This open port represents a significant security risk. Finally, the RIAA has been targeting primarily FastTrack users, which is the network Kazaa shares on. So, if junior happens to get a copyright-infringing song, the risks appear greatest if he used Kazaa. I'd probably suggest EDonkey or Shareaza as good alternatives. BitTorrent is also a good suggestion." (Readers' comments are always welcome - email them to me anytime!)

Teen hacker hired

A bit of irony here: 18-year-old Sven Jaschan, arrested for writing the Sasser worm and reportedly behind 70% of the virus infections that circled the globe the first half year of this year, has been offered a job by German computer security firm Securepoint. According to ZDNet UK, the company says it "would like to hire the reformed script kiddy because he had knowledge in the field and deserved a chance to prove himself." Well, who would know better how to fend off future worms or what goes on inside a malicious hacker's head? Here's more from the BBC on Securepoint's decision, including that "Mr. Jaschan has become something of a minor cause celebre in his native Germany, with his own fan club - the Sasser Support Team - claiming that his virus was intended merely as a wake-up call to the world."

Norway to block child porn

Starting next month, Telenor, Norway's government-controlled telecommunications company, will be blocking illegal child porn for its nearly 1 million Internet customers, Agence France-Presse reports. This is a joint project between Telenor and Kripos, a national law-enforcement agency, which is providing the database of child porn sites against which Telenor's filters will check all Web site requests. Telenor says there is no consumer privacy issue because "it would not log nor keep other records of those who attempt to access blocked sites, and that it would only block sites listed by the police." The project sounds similar to the Cleanfeed child-porn-blocking technology BT has announced it will soon be providing its customers in the UK (see my 6/11 issue). In other anti-child-porn news, Swiss police announced this week that more than 900 people have been arrested as the result of an international investigation into subscriptions to child-pornography Web sites. The Associated Press reports that 140 of those people were in the US. "The other arrests were in Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland."

Net search gets better

Jeeves the friendly search butler went on vacation and has come back looking 20 years younger. CNET cleverly called it Jeeves's "extreme makeover," because there's more to Jeeves than the animated character that's gotten spiffed up. Now there's MyJeeves, "a personalized storage locker for Web surfers' search results"; "Smart Search" for more local information (map, movies, weather, plus spell check, conversions - loads of ways to search); and - in the near future - Jeeves's own search toolbar for your desktop. But Jeeves is not alone in improving Web searching. According to CNET, Yahoo and Google are one step ahead of him at least in the area of searching for local info. And Google's had its own desktop toolbar for some time. Then there's Amazon's new A9.com. Here's what USAToday says you can do with it: "Drag and drop search results into an online virtual bookmark on Amazon's new search engine. Also available: an online 'diary' to make notes about each saved site." The USAToday piece takes a closer look at this whole phenomenon of next-generation, personalized Web search tools.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Phishers getting smarter

The newest technique phishers (online scammers) use to separate us from our money is proper spelling and grammar, the New York Times reports. Indeed, you used to be able to catch these scam emails at their game because they looked like they were written by a kid. Phishers are getting more prolific and more sophisticated, so be sure not to be duped into "securing" your financial information or "updating" your account by clicking on a link to, say, Citibank's Web site and giving the scammer your password or social security number. In fact, the Anti-Phishing Working Group told the Times it has seen "492 different mass-mailings intended to fool Citibank customers." In this case, Citibank is just as much a victim of identity theft as its customers could be. See "Even kids can be phishers" for links to anti-phishing tips.

CA: Tough on file-swappers

Kids are specifically mentioned in California's new law against anonymous file-sharing. The law, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed this week, establishes fines and possible jail time for anonymous file-sharers, CNET reports. "The new law says that any California resident who sends copyrighted works without permission to at least 10 other people must include his or her email address and the title of the work." If they don't, they face fines of up to $2,500 and up to a year in prison. Minors can receive fines of up to $250 for the first two offenses; the third can bring the fine to $1,000 plus a year in county jail.

Marketing 'fun' at school

What most parents don't know, according to one children's advocate, is that "back to school" means back to the world of infotainment for a lot of kids. Schools usually provide an Internet "acceptable use policy" that outlines proper online behavior and safeguards against inappropriate content, but "little is formally being done to shield kids in school or at home from 'immersive advertising' or corporate-sponsored 'advergames' such as the Neopets Web site, which contains loads of embedded advertising messages [in games] and links to merchandise," Reuters reports. Reuters is citing the view of the Center for Digital Democracy, which is urging the US Federal Trade Commission to review marketing technologies used to attract children. Some data in the article: "the average American child is exposed to 40,000 ad messages each year" and "advertisers spend about $15 a year targeting kids through sites like Neopets." Food sites Reuters mentions which are marketing to kids include TooMunchFun.com, Postopia.com, and NabiscoWorld.com.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Our kids are multitaskers

As if we didn't know it. "Kids are listening to music while watching television while wirelessly surfing the Net while instant messaging. And then the cell phone will ring," reports the Chicago Tribune. Children think they're getting more accomplished in a shorter time, and parents worry that not one of these multiple tasks is being done well. But what's new in this report is the suggestion that "maybe we are slowly wiring future generations in a new way.... Maybe we're turning ourselves into what our newest cell phones are: portable units capable of communicating in multiple formats." The Trib's not kidding. There's research saying that our children are IM-ing more than they're using email and that instant messaging has gained a major foothold in the workplace, where our kids will eventually be doing a lot of their communicating. So today's multitasking teens just may be getting good training for tomorrow's professional environment. Another way to thinking about all the time our kids are spending with IMs; at least, it's realistic to consider that nothing about technology is either wholly negative or entirely positive. In a sobering endnote, the Trib points to the digital-divide problem: the future for kids who don't have everyday access to this technology right now.



BTW, we'd love to get comments (and policies!) about IM-ing kids at your house - send them to me at anne@netfamilynews.org.

Tunes the IM way

File-sharing isn't the only way the music fans at your house will be swapping tunes. If Yahoo and MSN have their way, instant-messaging will soon be kids' favorite way to share music. "While the popular IM software already lets people listen to online radio, new versions will let people share and interact with one another's digital playlists," CNET reports. Yahoo's plans are still sketchy (though it just acquired the MusicMatch online service), CNET adds, but Microsoft has already announced it would tie its new MSN Music Store into its Messenger service. MSN's testing the packaging of Messenger with its ThreeDegrees software, which allows IM-ers to share their music playlist with other members in a private group. Sounds like it could be a lot like the new stand-alone service Grouper that I mentioned last week in "Legal Online Music." Grouper allows a private group of friends to listen to each other's music, but it's "streamed," not downloaded, thus legal (no copyright-theft issue, so the RIAA can't sue). Meanwhile, a new study found the MP3 player market is "about to explode," CNET also reports, including teenagers who will be spending their allowances (or hard-earned money) downloading music from the likes of iTunes, Napster, and MSN Music Store onto all those MP3 players.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Games for phones: A downside?

Parents, you do know that there's a lot of online chat associated with multiplayer gaming, right? (That is, gaming over the Net.) And, "as millions buy increasingly powerful cell phones, many companies are racing to develop video games to take advantage of the newfound portability," the Associated Press reports. What they mean by "portability" is that gamers can be anywhere. Which means that fellow chatters and players can reach kids anywhere - those who have these news phones with color screens, extra memory, and faster processors. As one expert told the AP, these phones are basically networked computers. Nothing to be alarmed about, just something for parents to think about: that there's a downside as well as an upside to almost any technology. With the new mobile Internet, as opposed to the old fixed Net, kids can be reached by just about anyone, not just in our homes but also when they're anywhere else. And, yes, in this case they'd be fellow gamers, but gamers who are strangers. And strangers who aren't perceived to be so, who already have "something in common" with the young people they're chatting with, because, "Hey, Mom, it's just a game."

Libraries: Cooler than the Net

The question arises ever more frequently: Do students ever step foot in libraries anymore? Yes, say some librarians, and the reason is, many libraries are even better than the Internet, students are beginning to find. And libraries are online too (this is not news to librarians!). According to the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript, a librarian at Williams College says forget the statistic (from the Pew Internet & American Life project) that 73% of college students "used the Internet more than they used the library." They're coming back to libraries because of the deep, rich databases of information they subscribe to which aren't accessible with a mere Internet connection. This anecdote says it all: "A Williams art history major from Schenectady, N.Y., who declined to give her name, said the library has become easier to use than Internet because she can search databases of scholarly journals to locate the full text articles she needs for research projects. And if she gets stuck, she asks a librarian for help." For a short study at Wellesley College on how much help young Net-researchers at that college need, see "Critical thinking: Kids' best research (and online-safety) tool" in my newsletter.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Adware, spyware: Huh?

We hear these terms, but what do they really mean to real families with real kids who, we're told, download this stuff all the time? What they mean for most of us is family PCs operating way below normal speed, sometimes crashing a lot or getting so locked up we have to call in the techies (often our kids!) for help. As the New York Times puts it in a thorough look at the phenomenon from both consumer and adware sender (from sleazy to legitimate) perspectives, these nasty little software programs have turned the Web into a virtual minefield for us all. We can accidentally download it just by going to certain Web sites or downloading adware disguised as a music file on a file-sharing network like BitTorrent or Kazaa. "Some spyware creeps onto a computer's hard drive unannounced, often by piggybacking onto other software programs that people download or by sneaking through backdoor security gaps in Web browsers," according to the Times. The good news is, increasingly, legitimate adware businesses don't want to annoy us, their bread 'n' butter. They're trying to be more up front with us and help us delete what we don't want on our computers. Meanwhile, while they're cleaning up their act, there are countermeasures: free spyware-detection software like Ad-Aware and Spybot-Search & Destroy. You can't really have a secure, healthy family PC these days without it.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Possible P2P policies

Here are two ways to go for musically minded families (customize away!): 1) Allow use of a service like Kazaa or BitTorrent to find and download legal music (decide whether to allow or disable file-sharing. Possible rules: Keep it legal; try to download only music; have an anti-spyware app installed and scan and delete spyware at least weekly; tell us if you happen to download anything strange. Risk: that kids will accidentally download porn and viruses. 2. Don't allow file-sharing services like Kazaa, Limewire, or Blubster; develop a list of free-and-legal music download sites; and set a family budget for downloading at pay-per-tune sites like iTunes, MSN Music, or Napster. Allow a service like Grouper.com for file-sharing among friends. Of course, these are just a couple of general directions families can take - let me know what's working for you (or which way you're leaning). For more on all this, see today's issue of my newsletter.

Legal sharing

If your child says s/he really wants to be able to share music with friends, and that's the whole reason for having Kazaa, BitTorrent, or Blubster on the family PC, there are wholly legal alternatives. One of the newest of these is Grouper, described in The Register. It allows you to share music, but just among a group of friends you sign up, and group members are streaming each other's music, which means you're listening to the music on the other's guy's hard drive, not even downloading it. Some kids might object to this because they then can't copy it to their MP3 player or burn it onto a CD, but maybe we can't have everything? And there's always iTunes, Napster, and other pay-per-tune sites - or the legal-but-free-music sites Jon lists above - for copying and burning. If you want to block file-sharing altogether, there's software for that now. A product called Blockster is now in beta and can be tested for free. For other such P2P-detection-and-blocking software, here are the results of a Google search for "block file-sharing." For more on all this, see today's issue of my newsletter.

Legal downloads

Kid file-sharing is problematic for parents, there's no doubt about it. Even if our kids have figured out how to avoid the viruses, spyware, and porn readily available on the P2P networks (see "File-sharing realities"), there's the ever-present issue of illegal music. Fortunately, Jon Pareles of the New York Times clears up the legal question for us: "Downloading music from the Internet is not illegal," he writes, despite the message we're getting from the RIAA and its thousands of lawsuits against file-sharers. What is illegal, as found in "the fine print of those lawsuits," Jon writes, is "unauthorized distribution: leaving music in a shared folder for other peer-to-peer users to take." What's also great about this article is that Jon goes on to list nearly three dozen sites offering free, unqualifiedly legal music - from musicians' own sites to collections of classical, reggae, alternative, Iraqi, Asian, Brazilian, folk, and electronic music, to name a handful. There's so much wonderful, completely legal music for all tastes out there on the Web. For more on all this, see today's issue of my newsletter.

Watch out: Virus war

Somebody's going to make a movie of this. Virus writer Sven Jaschan caught by police. Admits to creating the Sasser worm that sweeps the world's computers. Exulting in his demise, arch-rival malicious hackers "using their favourite calling card - a tenacious computer virus dubbed MyDoom - "send out a new plague called MyDoom.Y with an attachment bearing a picture of Jaschan "to mock their vanquished foe," as Reuters described their exploit. Of course, the nameless, faceless victims of all this hacker hubris are us. So keep that anti-virus software humming (actually, just make sure it's installed and heed every update if it's not automatic). Here's CNET on the new MyDoom making the rounds.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Fending off zombie-dom

You've heard it here before, and it sounds like something from the Twilight Zone: Your family PC could be a zombie, part of a network of zombies controlled by hackers with a profit motive. And there are layers of them, from the virus and worm writers who take over the PCs and rent out the resulting zombie networks to the scammers who manipulate them, USAToday reports. "Phishing" - tricking people into clicking to a bogus bank site and providing the scammers with user name, password, and bank account - has become big business, as phishers skim small amounts from a large number of bank accounts, undetected. How has it come to this? Simple: "The vast majority [of PC owners] don't use firewall software to block intruders, patch vulnerabilities, or keep anti-virus subscriptions current." Those are the three cardinal rules for PC security. Other tips from a USAToday sidebar are: distrust all email attachments, including those posing as PC security patches ("no software vendor will ever send you patches via email"); back up all your important documents and folders at least once a month (see my 8/27 issue); "use complex passwords and periodically change them and your PINs; beware of spyware (download a free anti-spyware program like Ad-Aware or Spybot); and consider switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer (see the sidebar for more on this).



The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg offers a clear, more radical approach in "How to Protect Yourself from Vandals, Viruses If You Use Windows." See also "What if our PC's a Zombie?" in my 7/16 issue.

Dorm thievery countermeasures

A multimillion-dollar industry has developed around keeping university students' tech gear in their dormitory rooms, USAToday reports. "Students can cart $3,000 or more in gear to campus just by toting their laptops, digital cameras, MP3 players, PDAs and DVD players," all of which are very portable. What's being done? Everything from those credit-card-style room keys hotels use to special safes and steel footlockers.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Get the patch - again

Even if you actually downloaded Microsoft's recent mother-of-all-patches, Service Pack 2 (SP2), experts say we really need to go to the Windows Update page for this one too, the Associated Press reports. Especially if we're among the some 200 million owners of Windows XP computers. Microsoft says an attacker could use the flaw this patches to install viruses or take control of XP PCs, that this can happen if people simple go to a Web page that has a specially doctored photo on it, or read an email message with such an image in it. The security flaw could also be in dozens of other Microsoft programs on your machine, which is why MS wants us to go to its update page to have our systems scanned for it.



And did you hear about the talking worm? Fortunately, PC security experts are calling it low-risk, but it really does talk. According to CNET, the worm "uses the Windows Embedded Speech Engine" to play a friendly little message in English (from a guy who says he's Turkish) after the Windows XP boot-up music has played. It "also deletes certain files, causing Windows to fail. It spreads automatically via an e-mail titled "Listen and Smile," and alters home page settings in Internet Explorer." The anti-virus software I'm sure you have installed will take care of this one.

More girl game makers (pls?)

It's a perennial topic because, you'd never know it, but girls and women represent 43% of the $10 billion industry's customers. (The 43% figure comes from Greg Palmer, producer of PBS's "The Video Game Revolution"; the $10b figure is from USAToday.) But the anecdotal evidence just doesn't stack up. To wit: USAToday's piece led with Jennifer Canada's experience at Southern Methodist University. She is one of two women among the 100 students enrolled in SMU's Guildhall school of video game making. And women represent 10% of game developers. But there's hope, at least at SMU. "Guildhall has partnered with the online female job recruiting Web site Mary-Margaret.com and the game review Web site WomenGamers.com to create what's believed to be the first video game scholarship for women in the nation," according to USAToday. "The scholarship will provide about $18,500, or half the cost of an 18-month certification program." Maybe this will eventually mean a lower percentage of first-person-shooter games - or more "thought-provoking, story-driven games with more female lead characters and less carnage." For reviews of games girls like, see also Games4Girls.com.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Digital cheating

What's the academic world coming to? "In January 2003, the University of Maryland ... failed a group of accounting students for using cellphones to receive text-message answers during a test. In England last summer, proctors caught 254 secondary-school students illicitly using cellphones during tests," the Wall Street Journal reports. The article also cites Chinese students facing criminal charges of stealing state secrets because they were texting answers to a national college-entrance exam and other cheaters in Ireland, South Korea, New Zealand, and Canada. So schools are considering countermeasures - technologies that disable the camera function on cellphones, automatically reroute incoming calls to voicemail and block outgoing calls, or detect calls within a 90-foot area and sound an alarm. Few schools are actually testing these technologies, the Journal says, but they know about them and some are considering using them as deterrents. Besides, some schools believe "low-tech cheating schemes, which can be combated only with astute proctors, remain a bigger problem." Pathetic examples of the low-tech variety: Test takers carving exam answers into pencils or lining up M&Ms on a desk color-coded for multiple-choice questions. For more on this, see "Net-enhanced plagiarism" and "Teachers & Net plagiarism."

Tablet PCs in school

They're basically laptops you write on, like a notepad, and they're gaining ground in US schools. "Educators at a handful of schools, many of them private high schools, are pressing ahead with plans to issue students tablet PC's for use in English, foreign language, math, science and social studies classes, the New York Times reports. Two obstacles they faced were price (that's coming down) and handwriting recognition (that has improved with Microsoft's update of the Windows XP Tablet PC operating system, according to the Times). Teachers apparently like the collaboration tablet PCs allow. In one math class, "a teacher could write out an equation in a shared workspace that is displayed on the classroom's [electronic] whiteboard, and students seated at their desks can use their tablet pens to take turns adding steps to it." The teacher told the Times it was like having 20 kids at a blackboard, chalk in hand. Teachers can also see how students are progressing on a pop quiz, as they're taking it, cut down on after-school (and in-school) paperwork, and catch any instant messages being circulated during classtime (uh oh, I can see paper coming back in fashion for classroom socializing!).

Monday, September 13, 2004

Chicago schools: E-rate struggles

Remember the e-rate? It was big news back in the late-'90s, as US schools and libraries gratefully scrambled to apply for the federal program that helped them with Internet access (funds came from adding a tax to consumers' phone bills). The bulk of e-rate news more recently has been about corruption concerns. It's interesting that the first place I find an e-rate update this month is out of the UK. The Register reports that Chicago schools that turned to the e-rate program "have suffered through a string of bureaucratic blunders, politically tainted contracts and overall incompetence," and many of the city's poorest schools remain without Internet access at all. The Register is covering investigative reporting done by the Chicago Tribune, which found, among other things, that "Chicago has received a stunning total of $389 million from E-rate but may have to give up $50 million of that total as a result of failing to meet federal deadlines to spend the cash."

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Penn. child-porn law thrown out

A US federal court Friday threw out a Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers to block access to online pornography, calling the law unconstitutional, the Associated Press reports. "No one challenged the state's right to stop child porn, which is already illegal under federal law," but civil liberties organizations such as the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the law because they said that for two years after it was passed, ISPs "trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography or even legal pornography, but shared Internet addresses with the offending sites." The law also made ISPs liable for content being served from a computer in another country and violated interstate commerce rules established by the Constitution, the court found, according to the New York Times's coverage. "Judge Jan E. Dubois was ultimately persuaded that given the current state of technology 'the Act cannot be implemented without excessive blocking of innocent speech in violation of the First Amendment'." The Pennsylvania law was the only one of its kind in the US, and a lot of state governments were interested in its fate. As of this writing, the state attorney general's office had not said if it would appeal the decision.

Friday, September 10, 2004

Cybersocializing, cyberbullying

For kids and teens, the online social scene is a little like what happens when 18-year-olds go off to college. Suddenly there's a lot of freedom; people get experimental socially. Most of what happens is relatively harmless, some not. What's different about the online scene is, the experimentation starts at a much younger age and - to an even greater degree - there are no grownups around. What I mean is, so far: 1) Parents and educators have "few clues" about what's going on in the free- wheeling world of teen cybersocializing (Xanga.com, LiveJournal.com, Blogger.com, chat, email, IMs, file-sharing, etc.); 2) There's an unwritten rule there that what happens online stays online (teens are reluctant to fill us in); and 3) Some of us parents even agonize about whether we should respect their privacy and not even go there (see "Daughter's blog, mom's dilemma").



The thing is, there's nothing private about it. It's all going on in a public forum, the Internet, and the youngest online socializers (kids 9-14) generally don't understand the implications. They don't understand that when they post text and pictures involving peers in a public forum it can be even more hurtful, it can spread far beyond their circles, and it can be nearly impossible to take back. That's why parents need to know what's going on and help our kids get some street smarts. To that end, I interviewed Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRI). Nancy is also a mother of three, has taught children with behavioral difficulties, and has a background in computer and copyright law, as well as education technology. [Please see my newsletter this week for background, solutions, and links to cyberbullying stories around the country.]

Mobile phones & porn

In Europe and Asia, kids' exposure to pornography on mobile phones is becoming as big an issue as their access to Web-based porn is in North America. And it's only a matter of time in this hemisphere, as more and more US families have picture and video phones. Regs are in the works overseas. "Governments in Japan, Germany, Australia, and Taiwan are proposing or passing legislation that requires mobile operators to protect minors from pornographic or violent content on phones and to put controls on cellular chat and dating services," the International Herald Tribune reports, adding that "cellphone operators in Britain have voluntarily adopted a code of conduct and agreed to implement filtering systems by year-end." So far, the problem with Net-connected cell phones, according to one of the Herald Trib's sources, is that there are no password-protected or administrative access controls that parents can put on the phones the way they can on PCs. Phone companies in Europe are beginning to offer some parental controls, and in Asia "the Japanese government has set aside around $2 million to help finance development of new mobile phone filtering technology," according to the Herald Trib. In the US, parental-controls technology for cell phones exists, but the phone companies haven't yet bought in and offered it to customers (for more on this, see my 5/7 issue). Meanwhile, the popularity of "smart phones" - with email, multimedia messaging, camera, games, video and music player, and more - is taking off, the BBC reports. For more on all this, check out London-based Childnet International's hard work on this front.

Thursday, September 9, 2004

Video games past & present

Ever wonder how we got here - to twitching thumbs, PS2- and GameCube-style? Or how they make these games that children (and adults) find so compelling? This week PBS premiered "The Video Game Revolution," and there's lots in its companion Web site about all this too. The show "takes viewers back to the early days of the first gamer and provides insight into how the art and economics of the creation of video games have changed over the years," the Washington Post reports. "The PBS documentary features interviews with key industry participants, including Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Nintendo's lead designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of such hit games as 'Donkey Kong' and 'Super Mario Brother,' 'SimCity' creator Will Wright, Microsoft’s Xbox developer Seamus Blackley, and Tim Moss, lead programmer for Sony Computer Entertainment. The show's producer, writer, and host, Greg Palmer, discussed his project with people all over the US at the Post site (URL above).

Retro tech for 20-somethings

Forget sleek and minimal. More and more 20-somethings prefer their technology to come in big, bulky and retro packages, the New York Times reports. For example, 21-year-old John Henry Flood said no thanks to PS2. For him, cool is the 1977 Atari 2600, with its wood-grain paneling. And 27-year-old Eugene Auh is psyched that he snagged a Motorola DynaTac, "a 1980s-era 'brick' cellphone that fits more comfortably in a backpack than in a suit pocket" for just $25.95 on eBay. To appeal to such esthetics, two market-savvy teenagers in New York are literally "retrofitting" old toasters and radios by putting computers inside them. A company called Verbatim is making inky-black recordable compact discs that look like miniature 45-r.p.m. vinyl records. Turntables are back too, so are wooden radios, and remember the color avocado? It's chic again too (sigh).

Teen hackers' exploits

If you believe what he claims, and the police seem to, the 19-year-old in Germany who took over eBay Germany couldn't even be called a hacker. He happened upon some Web sites that described how to do a DNS (domain name server) transfer and "just for fun," he requested a transfer for a handful of sites, including Google.de, Web.de, Amazon.de and eBay.de, CNET reports. Most of his requests were denied, but the one for eBay wasn't. "It is unclear how the domain could have been transferred without the consent of the owner," CNET adds. "The teenager said he did not want to cause damage. Indeed, according to [police], he was shocked when he was told that he had become the new owner of the eBay.de Web address." EBay.de is now back in eBay's hands. Meanwhile, a real hacker, Sven Jaschan, the 18-year-old who admitted he created the Sasser worm that infected PCs worldwide, has been formally charged with computer sabotage, data manipulation and disruption of public systems, the BBC reports. Sven Jaschan, like the eBay hijacker above, lives in Lower Saxony. If found guilty, Jaschan faces up to five years in prison.

Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Teen-only PC: the 'hip-e'

Hmmm. Will teenagers want a PC just for them called the "hip-e"? That's the $64 thousand-(or million-)dollar question for Digital Lifestyles Group, the Austin-based company that makes it. Like an iPod, it's mostly white and, like a cell phone or an IM service's graphical interface, it has customizable "skins" (e.g., fuzzy pink faux fur, a leopard or graffiti look), CNN reports. To get to a teen level of hipness (after talking with a bunch of teens), the company set out to "Apple-ize" or "iPod-ize" the PC. Quite naturally, the hip-e's a communications hub and entertainment-media tool, not a work station. It's wi-fi enabled (for wireless connecting), can be synched with a cell phone (on the Sprint network) and connected to a video game console, a TV tuner, and a MP3 player/keychain data-storage drive, and it has a huge hard drive for tune and video storage. For young consumers, it includes "a prepaid debit account that teens or their parents can put money into, to fund the cell phone, online shopping, or music downloads." Digital Lifestyles reportedly has done of ton of teen-focus-group testing, but we wonder if teens will go for something actually designed to be cool. The company's smart about this, for sure, though: they know that if the thing's designed for 16-year-olds, 14-year-olds (and anybody younger who's heard about it) will probably want it more. It's pricey at $1,699; the company explains in its marketing message to parents that they save by not having to buy a TV, MP3 player, video player, boombox, and PC separately (if the child doesn't already have most of those things). Here's gadget blog Gizmodo's take, and the hip-e's own Web site.

Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Pro-anorexia sites: Parents' heads-up

They're community sites, often run by anorexics themselves, in which participants encourage each other to "stay strong" and stick with often false and dangerous weight-loss practices, the BBC reports. Many of the sites offer "advice and handy hints to users to enable them to dupe their [doctors]." Some help participants pair up - meet a "buddy" who can keep them focused on "their quest for the body 'beautiful'" and fend off therapists and others whose aim it is just to "make us fat," according to what experts say about the paranoid mentality expressed in many pro-anorexia sites. Parents may also want to know that a lot of these sites are underground - password-protected - so they can't be found and shut down. UK-based "online counsellor" Greg Mulhauser reports that "there is a growing quantity of material that is pro anorexia on Xanga" in particular. Xanga.com is a blog community popular among teens. For more on Xanga, see "Xanga and other hangouts" and "Teens' blog life."

Monday, September 6, 2004

Libraries & filters: Fresh reports

After the arrest of an alleged child molester who was accessing porn in a Phoenix, Ariz., library, the city is pushing for regulations that would "bar adults from disabling filters designed to block objectionable Web pages on library computers," the Arizona Republic reports. Opponents say the city's regs would violate people's free-speech rights. "Previously, such stances, whether at the state, local or national level, have been contentious, uphill battles, marked by emotional rhetoric and standing-room-only crowds. And more often than not, the cases have ended in high-profile lawsuits," the Republic adds, saying the mayor and a majority of the City Council are ready for the fight. Meanwhile, in Portland, Ore., Molly Raphael, director of the Multnomah County libraries, is proposing that all Internet searches by children 12 and younger be filtered unless parents or guardians want them to have unlimited access, the Associated Press reports. Patrons 13-16 could access anything under the proposal, which Raphael said tries to introduce flexibility and a choice for parents. A critic, Stephanie Vardavas, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Library, said that filters "aimed at blocking X-rated material also screened out a link to Shakespeare's complete plays and the full text of Jane Eyre. One filter even blocked a search for the site for the 30th Super Bowl because it was listed as Super Bowl XXX, she said." Library officials' response was that every filter is different.

Friday, September 3, 2004

Misc. resources for online familes

I get lots of email from makers and publishers of resources for parents. I don't endorse products and software because, as a little nonprofit, Net Family News doesn't have the resources to test them properly, but I do occasional roundups in case there's something you've been looking for among these (I do check out every Web site and only pass along the ones I feel are worth a look). Click here for links to "Sleepy" software, finding housing around 3,600 colleges and universities, online character ed, a new "safe e-playground," image filtering, parenting from Oz, and "turn-based" games on the Web.

Kids 'n' cell phones

Fifty-six percent of US kids 13+ have cell phones, according to Common Sense Media, which suggests that parents are dealing with some phone issues. The kids' media literacy organization offers some good advice to head off some of the harsher of these - suggestions such as forging a family contract that establishes who pays for extra minutes each month, deals with protecting young phone-users' privacy, alerts kids to behavior that becomes cell-phone cyberbullying, and promotes good mobile manners. See also my feature last spring on the prospect of cell-phone parental controls, with thoughts from Lynn Hayes, a mother of three teenagers.

Thursday, September 2, 2004

IM: Grownups catching up?

Well, the numbers are growing - more than 40% of online Americans 18+ now instant message (53 million), according to just-released figures from the Pew Internet & American Life project. But look at the breakdown from AOL's survey that included teens (in 20 large cities, as opposed to Pew's rural and urban sample): 90% of 13-to-21-year-olds IM, 71% of those 22-34, 55% of people 35-54, and 48% of those 55 and up, the Washington Post reports. Something important that parents might want to remember: Adults use IM differently from kids, and it behooves parents to get a handle on how their kids are using this popular tool of the teen social scene. Here's the online safety piece: expression vs. protection in IM. "Instant messagers use the expressive tools of IM [buddy icons, online profiles, avatars] more frequently than the protective tools that allow them to block unwanted communications. Buddy list management also occurs relatively infrequently, with users reporting adding or deleting buddies from their list no more than a few times a month." For more on this, have a look at "IM risks & tips," based on an interview with Tim LaFazia, PC security expert and father of six.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Youth covering the convention

Young reporters with Children's PressLine are covering the Republican National Convention just as they did the Democratic one (see "Kids & politics" in my blog). One reporter asked a delegate from Texas about how Republicans will address children's issues, and was told that "providing social services is the job of 'churches and Christians. If it's done through the churches ... children will be taken care of properly ... all [the federal government] has done is take care of the outside of children and we haven't provided them with what they need inside to be better people and grow up to be productive adults." Don't miss the rest of what they got at ConnectforKids.org. See also answers from both George Bush and John Kerry to Connect for Kids questions on kids' issues. For more on teaching kids about the democratic process, see KidsVotingUSA and TakeYourKidstoVote.org.

VoIP: How to phone online

Have family overseas? Want your college kid to call home freely? Now, using the Net for long-distance phoning is easy on the family budget as well as easy to do. It starts at $29.95/month for unlimited calls anywhere in the US and Canada and 4 cents/minute for international calls. The Washington Post lays it all out very clearly - the two types of Net telephony (using your regular phone or special equipment); the cost; the providers; the how-to-plug-in; and two important caveats (911 service and electrical outages, which suggest that we not eliminate land lines entirely). As for Mac users, CNET reports that Skype just launched its service for them this week (in beta, but don't let that deter you - Skype for PCs had at least hundreds of thousands of users while it was still being beta-tested).

A whole US city wi-fi'd?!

Yes. It's in the works in Philadelphia - all 135 square miles of it, the Associated Press reports. For what city officials estimate will cost about $10 million, that would turn Philly into "the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot." The AP says the plan involves having hundreds, maybe thousands of small transmitters placed around the city, probably on top of lampposts. "Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel - including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare." The AP adds that the city is likely to provide this wi-fi access for free "or at costs far lower than the $35 to $60 a month charged by commercial providers." This could be a precedent for other cities, which - if they jump on this potential bandwagon - could help close the digital divide in US urban areas. Families who can't afford high-speed access will now just have to be able to acquire a router, hub, and wi-fi card, not to mention a computer in which to install that card!