Kids' self-victimization online

A 13-year-old boy in Washington State was arrested for posting 180 pornographic pictures, including photos of himself, in an online chatroom. After his first appearance in juvenile court, he was released to his parents while his case is pending, The Olympian reports. The case is baffling to the court and police, The Olympian adds, because of the boy's age. "Less than 3% of those arrested in child pornography cases are younger than 17. After the hearing last week, the boy's mother told reporters that "she thinks her son's dabbling with child pornography began out of curiosity and spun into something beyond his control. She said she thought the home computers had filters to block pornography." Unfortunately, cases like this are becoming less unusual, according to experts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which runs the CyberTipline for online exploitation of children. Please see my newsletter this week for their take on this disturbing phenomenon.

A dad on games

Reader, dad, and gamer Tim recently emailed me about a book review I cited in Harvard Business School's Working Knowldege. The book in question: "Managing the Gamer Generation." Interestingly, London University's Institute of Education just released a study finding that "games are a legitimate area of study in their own right," and "pupils should also be able to create their own games." See the BBC report on this. Here's Tim:



"I recently found and have been enjoying your blog. As a dad of two, and a gamer myself, I enjoyed the link you provided showing that gaming may not just be the idle waste of time my parents thought it was. But a minor correction: 'Fable' isn't a 'god sim.' Generally speaking, 'God sims' have a top-down perspective and feature an environment you can control, that automatons then populate. Generally speaking, despite their names, the player doesn't control the denizens of these worlds directly - you act instead as a deity who has more or less complete control of the world, and the creatures that populate it must live with the consequences of your decisions. Popular god games include 'The Sims,' and 'Sim City.' Historically, I believe the first of this genre was 'Populous,' and it's arguable that some strategy games (such as 'Civilization') have some elements of god games. Perhaps you were confused by the fact that Peter Molyneux, the creator of 'Fable,' previously released 'Black and White,' a god-type game. 'Fable,' like 'Black and White,' does have a very strong ethical component...." Click here for the rest of Tim's comment, and email me anytime.

Fairies top Halloween costume list

Though we usually think of ghosts, ghouls, and other creepies right about now, fairies are the No. 1 costume pick, at least by JeevesIQ's measure of top searches (if there's a fairy wannabe at your house, check out the cute little numbers at eFairies.com ). The rest of the Halloween costume Top 10 were Disney characters, Native American costumes, pirates, angels, princesses, devils, witches, Spiderman, and cowboys - in that order. Speaking of Halloween, and in a twist on trick-or-treating safety, the Bend [Ore.] Bugle ran an article this week on cell phones as a Halloween "safety net."

Centralized school filtering in Oz

The New South Wales state Education Department is testing a centralized filtering system for its school following the suspension of three students for viewing porn sites on school computers. According to Australian IT, the new filtering system is part of an $84 million plan to tighten Internet security in schools statewide. An Education Department spokesman "said increased security would ensure that inappropriate internet sites were blocked, bad language use stopped, and teachers could monitor chat rooms," Australian IT reports, adding that the system would not necessarily be able to block all overseas-based Web sites. It provides students with their own "electronic learning accounts" and email addresses.

E-rate: Unconnected schools in Alaska

In some rural schools, the Internet has become as essential as pencils and paper, and having e-rate funds on hold is a hardship, CNET reports. Take the Kuspuk School District, for example. It serves 416 students spread out over 12,000 square miles in southwestern Alaska - "only accessible by plane and, in the summer months, boats on the Kuskokwim River. Video conferencing over the Internet offered a perfect solution to the district's staffing shortage. The technology could be used to connect all nine of its schools, so that teachers and educational specialists could be shared throughout the district," according to CNET. Kuspuk was using e-rate funds (federal Net-connectivity subsidies for schools and libraries) for 90% of its Internet costs. The funding was put on hold while the Universal Service Administrative Company, which runs the e-rate program for the US Federal Communications Commission, is adopting new accounting rules. "The accounting changes and the ensuing chaos in the program have come at a time when the E-rate program is already under scrutiny from lawmakers over charges of fraud, waste and abuse," adds CNET, which does a great job of explaining this complicated problem.

The littlest gamers

Their ranks are growing fast. A lot of 4-to-6-year-olds want to keep up with older gamers in their families and/or are finding conventional toys increasingly boring. In an article on this group of gamers, the New York Times points out recent Kaiser Family Foundation research showing that "half of all 4-to-6-year-old children have played video games - on hand-held devices, computers or consoles - and one in four played several times a week." The figure is 14% for kids 3 and under. "It is unclear whether video games teach preschool children more about phonics and problem solving than about simply how to tool around in a virtual playground. But everyone seems to agree that the ranks of young video gamers are substantial," according to the Times. That's great news for the likes of VTech, Atari, Techno Source, and other game and console makers. While PS2 and GameBoy will probably appear on a lot of little tykes' wish lists this season, systems like V.Smile and Leapster are the "training wheels" parents are more likely to go for - at least, that's what these marketers are counting on. But the big video game companies like Sony and Nintendo are also developing little-kid-style accessories and games that reach into the lower age levels. Who will win - big brands with little-kid bells and whistles or kid brands that purportedly teach phonics? Email me what you think!

Apples on teen wish lists?

Well, there may not be too many iPod Photos on teenagers' holiday lists (they're $499!), and the just-announced U2 iPod is cool because it's black, but U2 is "so corporate," I've heard. Still, iPods and G5 computers have been leading the pack, where coolness is concerned, and not just in the aesthetics department. They really work. According to the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who reviewed three "supposed iPod killers" (Dell's Pocket DJ, the Rio Carbon and the Creative Zen Micro), the competition doesn't come close to the iPod in functionality. And the elegant G5 can do anything a Windows PC can do, reportedly (see "Freshest Apple"), with much more security (just because hackers always go after Windows PCs, though that's beginning to change - see "Mac users face rare threat").



However, even though teenagers won't be scrambling for an iPod sporting the signatures of U2's musicians, this special-edition iPod is very interesting - as part of the ongoing recording-industry-vs.-music-fans debate. One analyst told Wired News he was following this one because he's very curious to see how other bands will work with MP3 player makers as a means of distribution. Music marketing has become very complex - from testing tunes on blogs like MySpace.com to pre-installed playlists on MP3 players - and our teenagers are key targets of all these methods and messages. [BTW, the iPod Photo - which Apple says will hold 15,000 music tracks and 25,000 photos, according to the BBC and others - is an interesting experiment too. Do people really want a photo album on their MP3 player? Hmmm.]

Porn on phone screens

You might want to think twice before giving your child a cell phone with Web access. "Half of all wireless data content" - meaning Web content made accessible to those little cell phone screens - "is of an adult nature," Reuters reports. This is Web content specially designed for viewing on mobile phones, but it doesn't require super-sophisticated phones; it's available to just about any phone with a little screen that has been sold in the past year or so - for $5-$10 on top of your typical calling plan. "Mobile phone users around the world will spend $1 billion a year on pornography sent to their handsets by 2008," according to just-released Yankee Group market research cited by Reuters, and just as with the fixed Internet on our desktops, porn is expected to fuel the mobile phone service business. Vodafone, "the world's biggest mobile operator," has added child protections to its service in the UK, where Internet safety is a priority. Obviously the technology for cell-phone parental controls exists, but the US carriers have yet to adopt it. It's "in trials" at more than one carrier, said Chris Herrell, a spokesman for Boston-based BCGI, creators of the technology. For more on phone parental controls in the US, see my feature on this last May. And for info on Childnet International's pioneering work in Europe, see this page on their site. Here, too, is evidence (at Out-Law.com) that all UK mobile operators are working toward child protection: a new self-labeling or -classification system for publishers of mobile Web content.

Families' PC struggle

Millions of family PC owners think their PCs are secure (from viruses, spyware, hackers, etc.), when they're far from secure, a new study has found. The study, from America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance, found that 77% of Americans believe their computer was "very or somewhat safe from threats" and 73% from viruses, while 67% had outdated anti-virus software and 15% didn't have any anti-virus software installed, the Washington Post reports. It's a natural expectation, that the computers we buy come protected, but the basic concept I think a lot of us don't understand is that, when connected to the Internet, computers - even though they come packaged in boxes - aren't stand-alone products. They're connected to a constantly changing environment that their users are trying to understand and get used to. Studies like this will be a great tool for computer makers as they respond to families' PC struggles. For more on those struggles and what to do about them, please see "What if our PC's a zombie?" in my July 16th issue.



BTW, Mac users can expect greater security because of the way their operating systems were designed. There's an old myth that Windows PCs are more vulnerable because Windows has so many more users; here's a column by David Pogue of the New York Times that clears up that myth and gives four solid reasons why Apples are more secure. (There are, however, early signs that this is changing - see "Mac users face rare threat.")

Kids & the new search engines

Great resource this week from the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg: a roundup review of the four new search tools out there - Google's as well as Clusty.com, Amazon's A9.com, and My Yahoo. (Even more next-gen search engines are mentioned in a Washington Post article today.)



A parent's caveat: Something Walt didn't mention (no space and his audience isn't just parents) is what kids can run into, especially in A9.com if left unfiltered: A9's search turns up images on the same page as text results. I tested it with the word "nude" and - right on the main results page - got at least a dozen full-body nude shots, some in sexually explicit poses. I then went to "Preferences" (upper-right-hand corner) and clicked on moderate filtering, then saved my Preferences. My next search for "nude" turned up no images at all (same for strict filtering, of course). The good news is, A9 defaults to "moderate filtering" until you've registered (though I doubt there are many barriers to kids registering; of course if they want images, they can always go to Google Images search). For details on the other search tools, pls click to the latest issue of my newsletter. For more on image-searching challenges, see "Kids checking out porn with image searches" and "Kids and Net porn - moms' accounts."

Desktop search: Parent's-eye-view

Google's new search tool has been all over the news, but not the family angle on it. Ted Werth, dad and CEO of family-tech-support company PlumChoice, thoughtfully pointed out something you might want to know: "Parents may be able to use the Google tool to more easily understand what their children are doing with their computers. This tool will provide an easy index for looking at what the child has saved on the computer. While I believe that training children on computer safety is the best approach for safe computing, I'm a proponent of keeping a close eye on what kids do with their computers as well." To clear up the privacy concerns that have been aired in the media this past week, click to my newsletter.

Calling young Webmasters!

Parents and teachers, December 6 is the deadline this year for Web developers 18 and under to compete for a place at the prestigious,international Cable & Wireless Childnet Academy in Jamaica next spring. To qualify, they must be a key person in the development of a site that benefits other young people or have a great idea for the "New to the Net" category which they'd like to develop further.



Prizes: A place at the Cable & Wireless Childnet Academy, 3/26-4/1; a grant from the project development fund totaling $50,0000+; an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Jamaica (must be accompanied by an adult); and follow-up Web support from Childnet and the Academy's mentors and trainers. One of the biggest rewards, I feel, is the chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with peers from all over the world for a whole week. Winners usually represent nearly every continent. For more information, click to ChildnetAcademy.org.

Cyberbullying more harmful to kids

...than traditional bullying, that is. This is according to a just-released study at the Queensland University of Technology, cited by ThisIsLondon. The main reason, according to lead researcher Marilyn Campbell, is that there's no escaping online bullying, no haven, the way a child's home is when s/he runs away from a traditional bully. And, we would add, simply not going online is not an option for most kids and teens, for whom IM-ing, phone-texting, online chat, or email are so much a part of their social lives. Another reason why cyberbullying is more harmful is the size of the audience. Usually there are few people around when bullying occurs in a physical place; when it happens online, often everybody in a child's peer group knows what's going on, and sometimes the information is very personal. Imagine the impact of having an enemy expose your deepest secrets to everybody you know; it's at least much more long-lasting than the results of most physical fights. And the "secrets" being sent around don't even have to be true, of course. For example, who knows if the information shared in this online exploit (picked up in the San Diego Union Tribune) was true: "In Allendale, N.J., students viewed with alarm a Web site that named the school's "top five biggest homosexuals" and the "top 20 gayest guys and gayest girls." But there's potential physical danger too: "One 13-year-old Rockland County [N.J.] girl had a fight with her best friend. The ex-friend used the girl's screen name to enter an adult chat room and gave out the girl's phone number. A man from the chat room called the girl's home – but was intercepted by the mother."



For the Queensland study, "the researchers studied an entire year of a primary school in Brisbane, Australia, giving more than 30 children a series of in-depth tests and interviews to establish their attitudes to cyberbullying," ThisIsLondon reports. It's the first research I've seen on the different impacts between online and traditional bullying. For more on cyberbullying, see "Cybersocializing, cyberbullying" and "The IM life of middle-schoolers."

Vote next week?!

Parents and teachers, next Thursday, October 28, is Mock Election Day, "by any measure, the [US's] largest and most successful voter education project," according to a joint press release of National Student/Parent Mock Election and supporters USATODAY and American Happenings. More than 10 million students and parents cast their votes in the last two presidential Mock Elections in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and 14 countries/territories around the world where Americans are based, the release adds. Students have been debating the issues all along with peers in all 50 states and 176 countries at the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate, supported by, among others, a great youth-activism site called YouthNoise.com.



As for voter education, here's an example of what we're all up against: "According to a 2003 study from Rutgers University, eight out of ten 15-to-26-year-olds know that the animated Simpsons family lives in Springfield, but less than half know the political party of their State's governor, and only 40% can say which party controls Congress," said John Herklotz, Chairman of American Happenings and Vice-Chairman of the National Student/Parent Mock Election.

Home computing trend

Cheap "one-stop shopping" is the theme I detect in two announcements from Microsoft and other companies this week. First, there's the MSN TV 2 - "high-speed Internet without a PC," as the Wall Street Journal summed it up - or WEBTV for broadband and less money. For $200 up front and $22 a month, it bundles Net access and a large set-top box and wireless keyboard that allow for email, Web-surfing, photo-sharing, video-playing, IM-ing, and the ability to "open some common email attachments." Just the thing for people more interested in communicating than computing! The other new development (Microsoft's version code-name "Istanbul" but being worked on IBM and other companies) is targeting businesses first, but I can really see teenagers loving it. It "seamlessly integrates" Net-based communications - email, instant-messaging, video-conferencing, traditional phone service, and Internet-based calling, according to the Associated Press. "The products employ 'presence' technology, which tells users whether co-workers are online and their degree of availability - whether they can take a phone call or prefer to be emailed or to instead join a Web conference, for example," the AP reports, adding: "The idea is to enhance the 'buddy list' concept ... so workers can choose how to best communicate in a given moment." As usual, one can see privacy issues arising.

UK parents on kids' Net safety

A survey of UK parents of kids 5-15 with home Net access found that "only 8% of parents ... have implemented five of the most simple and important child safety guidelines." ISPA, the UK's Internet trade association which sponsored the survey, was referring to these five guidelines:

Use the Net in a high-traffic area of the house (38% of parents let their kids use the Net in a "private room").

Regularly remind kids of online safety rules (41% of those surveyed do, and 28% have never told their children not to give out personal info online).

Know who they're "talking" to online (13% of parents don't know if their child uses chat rooms, and of the 26% who know their kids do, 65% said they don't know who their kids' online friends are).

Surf the Net with your kids (63% frequently do, 23% never have).

Have online-safety software installed on computers kids use (32% of parents "have not enabled basic safety features such as Web and spam filtering; of the 68% who have enabled such features, "one in eight of them do not know if they have done so correctly").



In its own survey timed to the UK's recent Parents Online Week, the British government had two questions that matched ISPA's: computer placement in the home (57% of parents have it in a high-traffic area, as opposed to ISPA's 38%) and parents and kids online together (44% do not allow their kids to use the Net without them, close to ISPA's 63% of parents who frequently use the Net with their kids). According to The Guardian, the government survey also found that a significant 64% of UK parents have banned their children from chatrooms. Also, 40+% said their biggest concern about their kids' Net use was the risk of them meeting a pedophile; 52% of parents want more government regulation of Net use; 58% called for more education on Net; and 73% believe the Net is "a great source of information."



UK numbers are significant because Britain calls itself and is widely acknowledged to be the leading country in Internet safety work for children. Here's ISPA's press release on its survey.

K2K spells better test scores

Kid-to-kid communications, that is - iEARN-style (iEARN.org, the K-12, Internet- and project-based learning network connects about 1 million students in 25,000 schools in 109 countries, working on more than 150 projects in 30 languages). I'll get to what sort of project in a moment; the big news and surprise pay-off is what this Net-enabled collaboration is doing for students academically - in addition to the international understanding it fosters. According to iEARN's press release, teachers are seeing dramatic improvements in students' reading and writing skills when participating in K2K projects, especially at the elementary school level. A teacher in New Jersey has seen his 4th-graders' writing consistently score in the upper 1% in annual state exams. Pepperdine University professor Margaret Riel has done some early research on this, finding, for example, that one particular class, which started below grade level, gained an average of two grade levels from working on these collaborative network projects." Click to the release for further data. Some of these projects link students in as many as 12 schools as they work on a collaborative project. Teacher Kristi Rennebohm Franz facilitated a project by her 4th- and 5th-graders in which they sent "comfort quilts" to children in earthquake-devastated Bam, Iran. "As soon as they heard about the catastrophe ... [they] went to work on their project. Each child drew a crayon design, which was ironed onto a cloth patch and sewn into a quilt. They read Websites about how other schools were making quilts, including schools in Uzbekistan." Kristi started teaching with these projects in 1998 after Nicaragua was struck by Hurricane Georges. Thanks to TechLearning for pointing this news out.

Gamers: Future star workers?

"They know how to work in teams, are creative problem solvers, and believe that nothing is impossible," reports Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. That may be comforting news to some parents of young thumb twitchers who thought that about all they were developing was good hand-to-eye coordination - maybe. "Gamers will make great workers and employees," concluded the authors of the just-published "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever." They compare baby boomers, who see games as mere diversion, to members of the gamer generation, who've never known life without games and who see them as "a perfectly valid tool for solving problems, relating to other human beings, and discovering one's identity." Consequently, gamers approach the business world as "a bit more like a game." Great irony there: gamers as the ultimate realists!



BTW, maybe one way to learn how to be a good manager is to play "god sims" (where players control everything that happens). The newest one, called "Fable," was created by top British game designer Peter Molyneux and sold 375,000 copies within a week of its release in the US this fall, the BBC reports.

More ads in games

Our young gamers may escape their arch nemeses in video games, but there's no escaping all the ads. "The fictional landscapes of video games are increasingly being dotted with product placements, pitching everything from athletic shoes to movies," the Associated Press reports.

They're on buildings and billboards along virtual city streets, and they're simply products (cars, food, etc.) appearing in the games, just as in the movies. The way advertisers see it, TV viewership is going down and gaming up, and "video games now attract not just hard-core gamers, but people of all ages and more women than ever." Game sales surpassed movie box-office receipts last year. Another reason why advertisers are migrating to this medium: With game consoles connected to the Internet, ads can be updated anytime, long after games are sold. Here's the BBC on this later in the week.

Childcare Webcams

Some 300-400 US day-care centers have Webcams, USATODAY reports, and their promoters are going after schools as well. The article cites one mom who actually chose her 17-month-old's provider, The Learning Curve in Gilbert, Ariz., because it allowed her to "click into" her child's day this way (with a user name and password and only for parents of kids 2 and under). She tries to limit herself to two checks a day - to get a handle on her daughter's eating routine and when she wakes up from her nap. "The Web cams, each about the size of a smoke detector, capture all the playroom action from the ceilings of the center, giving parents a wide-angle view. Parents cannot hear sounds when watching their children online, the service does not have zoom capabilities, and changing areas are never shown," USATODAY adds.

IM-ing kids: Tech options for parents

"How can we track their instant-messaging?" was a question parents asked school counselor Amanda in the middle of a school community IM crisis. That's a question on many parents' minds that not many people can answer. SafeKids.com's Larry Magid tackled it for the New York Times, saying parents' monitoring and protection strategies depend on the IM system their kids use. And that, I'd add, usually depends on the system everybody else in their peer group uses - it would be nigh impossible to get a kid to switch systems - AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, whatever - if all her friends use something different and can't reach her on the parent-imposed one. (To use a techie term, IM systems, regrettably, are not "interoperable.") Click here for what options parents have, realistically (tech and non-tech).

Desktop search: Big new thing

Google announced it, then AOL immediately announced it was testing one, a feature in the stand-along Web browser it's developing (for everyone, including non-AOL subscribers). Ask Jeeves will soon announce its desktop tool too. What it means is searching for stuff on your family PC as easily and quickly as you search on the Web. But WAIT, there's an important caveat: privacy and PC security in this "new era of search," as SearchEngineWatch put it. "It's not new that computers have sensitive data that needs to be protected. What is new is how desktop search centralizes that data and makes it more accessible. This is only an issue if someone gets physical access to your computer, of course. If you log off and use a secure password, that will be a huge deterrent." Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know enough to do that. I'll keep you posted as I learn more about how worth it this "convenient" new tool really is. Here's the Associated Press on "How Google's Desktop Search Works," the Washington Post's thorough article on it, and NET on AOL's project.

P2P-ers gone underground

Have all the record industry's lawsuits really helped reduce file-sharing? A little bit, but they've also sent lots of tune-swappers underground, PC World reports. By "underground," the article means to smaller, lesser-known services than Kazaa, whose numbers have gone from a peak of 30 million to about 18 million (e.g., BitTorrent nearly doubled in users between 11/03 and 5/04 and eMule almost tripled between 2/03 and 2/04). Besides lower risk of detection for their users, these smaller services are more attractive than Kazaa because they offer faster downloading. They "use an advanced technique called 'swarming,' in which portions of files are downloaded from multiple sources and immediately offered to the network." File-sharers have also moved to the good ol' Usenet newsgroups that were around long before Napster, the first P2P service, arrived on the scene. Newsgroups are "a vast reservoir of music, movies, and software, at connection speeds that can put the better-known P-to-P services to shame," according to PC World. Fueling Usenet's new-found popularity is free and easy-to-use software like the Xnews reader (see if it's on your family PC), which makes newsgroups file-sharing more reliable than the P2P services. The downside is, Usenet's more public and trackable than, say, BitTorrent. The article also touches on Microsoft's Digital Rights Management software and includes sidebars on anti-piracy legislation in the works to software file-sharing.

'HIPSchools' helps students, etc.

HIPSchools is a program founded by a former Pittsburgh Steeler to get parents involved in their kids' education and, Wired News reports, it turned around Brooklyn's Walt Whitman Middle School 246, which had been deemed a failure by the state of New York. "The school has seen distinct improvement in the performance of its 1,300 students, as well as regular attendance, which has risen to 98% (an increase of over 10%) in the last two years," according to Wired News, and it is now off the state's list of "Schools Under Registration Review," which it was on for three years. Now used by more than 60 US schools, the HIPSchools system lets teachers post homework assignments and announcements on a Web site, where they can be viewed anytime. It also sends parents individual messages (via email, phone, fax, test-messaging, whatever the preference) about anything from kids' tardiness to meeting times to school projects.

Get the 7 new critical patches!

Microsoft told all Windows PC owners to download patches to 21 new flaws it found, USATODAY reports. The announcement came in the company's routine monthly security advisory, but "the number of serious flaws was higher than expected." Microsoft advises all home PC users to go to this page and - if they haven't already - sign up for its free Windows Automatic Update service.

Japan's Net suicide tragedy

Japanese police have found the bodies of nine people, some of them teenagers, believed to have committed suicide because of suicide-pact Web sites. "Japan has recently seen a wave of Internet-linked suicides, as people seek companions to die with," the BBC reports, adding that more than 34,000 people committed suicide in Japan last year, a small increase from the 2002 figure. According to the New York Times, "Japan has a suicide rate about twice the rate of the United States, and there are Web sites where people discuss suicide and suicide techniques. Some Web sites even sell kits offering 'painless' suicide."

Supreme Court nixes RIAA case

For a while, in its effort to make it as easy as possible to sue music swappers, the music industry had a practice, with subpoenas, of forcing Internet service providers to reveal their customers' identities without notifying the customers. Verizon was the first ISP to refuse to comply. Last December a federal appeals court said ISPs didn't have to comply with the bulk subpoenas (for which the RIAA argued, citing the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA), so the RIAA took its case to the Supreme Court.



Today the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rejection of the RIAA's tactic, Internet News reports. The RIAA's response was that the decision "will not deter [its] ongoing anti-piracy efforts." It's a big story this week. According to the Dow Jones Newswires coverage, the decision "could impact other pending copyright litigation efforts by the music industry." Here's Reuters too. Interestingly, this week a UK court did just the opposite - it ordered British ISPs to reveal their file-sharing customers' identities at the request of the British Phonographic Association, the RIAA's UK counterpart, CNET reports.

Teens, chat, predators: 2 cases

It makes for tough reading for parents, because at the time of the crime the victim was 10 years old, but the details help us understand how these relatively rare cases of online predation happen. In most cases the child thinks s/he's going to meet someone who cares about him or her. According to the Toronto Star, the girl in this case "met" the perpetrator, Sergio Arana Martinez, 35, in an online chat room, saying she was 13. Within a month, "the relationship between the two evolved from chat rooms to emails to phone calls" to an encounter in Martinez's apartment, the Star reports. Arana Martinez was found guilty on three counts, faces two more unresolved charges of sexual assault, and will be sentenced later this month in Ontario Superior Court. For context on this, see "Rethinking 'stranger danger'" last June, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's take on this in "Non-stranger danger," and a link to the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center's latest research on the subject. Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing the Toronto story out.

eDonkey on top

File-sharing fans at your house are more likely to be using eDonkey than Kazaa now, at least according to the latest calculations by California-based BayTSP, which monitors P2P activity for the media industry. BitTorrent's right up there too, ZDNet UK reports, while Kazaa's lead has been slipping for over a year. BitTorrent and eDonkey are file-sharing's third generation, after Napster and then Kazaa. Your kids will probably tell you which service they're using to download tunes, if they are at all, and ideally you'll go into the software together to see how it's configured to protect the other files on the family computer. If not, some monitoring software - e.g., Spector Pro, Guardian Monitor, and Media Fence - detects file-sharing activity and identifies the P2P programs being used on your PC. As for the risks involved (privacy, PC security, porn, legal, etc.), see "File-sharing realities for families" in my 5/28/04 issue.

'Teens on screens'

Sixteen-year-old Cassie Leap hated "these stupid online journal things" when she first started blogging two years ago, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times reports. But for some reason she stuck with it. Because research data is scarce, I link you to every article I run into on kids' cybersocializing because each offers insights, true stories, and at least anecdotal evidence of a scene still very unfamiliar to parents. One bit of data I wish we had is on whether teenagers are aware of the safeguards available to them in most blogging communities. Most of them - LiveJournal, Blurty, Xanga, etc. - are public, but bloggers don't have to use their real name (most do use screennames instead, I suspect), and usually they can create a password that peers have to know in order to read their journal and/or post comments. Of course, some teens probably establish passwords more so their *parents* can't read the journal, but that's better than everybody in the surfing public being able to read their closely held secrets. "Cassie's parents know their daughter spends $25 a year for a page hosted by Xanga.com," the Times says. "But she rarely shows it to them. It's for her and her friends, she says, like a phone call or an Instant Message." Do they go there every now and then? Yes. Her dad said he looks in on the online part of Cassie's life every now and then.

The IM life of middle-schoolers: A school's role

Of course, young Net users will tell you that their social scene is not limited to instant-messaging via AIM, Yahoo, MSN, or ICQ. Depending on their social network, it's also at Xanga.com, MySpace.com, LiveJournal.com, Blurty.com, the angrier DeadJournal.com, etc. Besides IM, MySpace is the online hangout of choice at Amanda's school, an independent middle school in Salt Lake City (which she asked not to be named); at Evergreen High School in San Jose, Calif., it's Xanga (see my 7/16 issue). Cell phones play a role too, and occasionally email. It's all very fluid.



So naturally what goes on in this online space spills over into school, "in the sense that they have to show up and sit next to one another the next day and they have to make eye contact and interact with each other," said Amanda, a kind, youthful, tech-literate, very professional school counselor. "Sometimes I'll sit the whole buddy list down" to work through one of the social emergencies she described for Part 1 of this series) but asked not to be detailed in order to protect counselor-student confidences. Please click here for more on how one school handles students' online social emergencies.

E-rate on hold

The Washington Post called it "schoolhouse shock," the Federal Communications Commission's quiet decision two months ago to put the e-rate on hold. The decision, with no notice, is "causing significant hardships at schools and libraries," the Post adds. The New York Times reports that "by one estimate, as much as $1 billion in expected grants could be suspended by the end of the year," and the FCC came under sharp criticism from Congress this week because of its decision. This may be good news for the Alliance for Childhood, which just released a report that "the high-tech, screen-centered life style of today’s children - at home and at school - is a health hazard and the polar opposite of the education they need to take part in making ethical choices in a high-tech democracy." The report, "Tech Tonic: Towards [sic] a New Literacy of Technology," can be found here. The Alliance's controversial previous report, "Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood," sent a similar message in 2000.

EarthLink: Too much spyware

The average Net-connected PC has 26 spyware programs on it, EarthLink, one of the US's largest Internet service providers, has found. That's unwanted malicious software on computers like yours and mine. "Spyware programs hide in PCs and secretly monitor user activity. Typically, spyware arrives bundled with freeware or shareware, or through email or instant messages. The programs are difficult to remove and may cause computers to run slowly or even crash," CNET reports. EarthLink worked with PC security company Webroot to scan more than 3 million computers between January and last month, finding 83 million instances of spyware." For anti-spyware help and a family perspective on the spyware problem, see "Spyware & an 8-year-old," 7/09, and SpywareInfo.com. Two popular free spyware-detect-and-destroy programs are Spybot and Ad-Aware; download them at Download.com and Tucows, respectively.

Anti-P2P: Carrot & stick

There was lots of online music news this week, not least of which was the latest round of record-industry lawsuits against US file-sharers (762), Reuters reports, and European ones (459). In Europe, recording industry ire was directed mostly at users of eDonkey, Kazaa, and Gnutella, according to a separate Reuters report. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that the thousands of lawsuits to date have barely made a dent - "23 million people are still using peer-to-peer services ... and worse yet, experts say the RIAA's scare tactics are beginning to be ignored."



The much more interesting *carrot* part of the industry's strategy was chronicled by the Washington Post in its look at MySpace.com. Warner Bros. allows its musicians' work to be previewed at MySpace, where users can "post personal profiles with pictures, set up blogs, chat on bulletin boards, play games and so on, combining elements of Friendster.com, Match.com, and America Online," according to the Post. The idea is to get R.E.M.'s 13th album exposure with a younger crowd, MySpace's official "sweet spot" of 16-to-24-year-olds, who can also "see band tour dates, buy the album at Amazon.com, download cell-phone ring tones, and read a band biography. MySpace drew 2.5 million visitors in August, the Post reports. On Capitol Hill, one of Congress's efforts to crackdown on file-sharing by going after its enablers (the P2P networks) has have been delayed. "The Senate Judiciary Committee has postponed a final review of the Induce Act after negotiations among the principal parties involved in crafting the bill collapsed," Wired News reports.

Global gaming competition

Is this where a gamer at your house is headed?: Professional gamers - young people who actually make a living playing games - faced off at the World Cyber Games finals in San Francisco this week. "That a small number of this generation's pinball wizards can support themselves playing video games comes as a surprise even to some of those doing so," the New York Times reports. The article zooms in on competitor 20-year-old Matt Leto of Allen, Tex., "recognized by many as the world's greatest Halo player." Halo, I learned from the Times, is an Xbox first-personOf course there are other roles besides gamers in this growing industry. For example, Andrei Mooi is USA vice president of the Seoul-based World Cyber Games, one of the largest organizations running international gaming leagues or tournaments. Some 700 gamers from more than 60 countries competed in San Francisco this week. Here's coverage from the BBC too.

Teen's life an open blog

At Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace, DeadJournal, Blurty, etc., minute details of teenagers' lives are available to anybody, anytime. We've heard it before, but this article from The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has some arresting new numbers and insights. Internet market researchers Perseus Development projects that there will be more than 10 million blogs by the end of this year, 52% of them by people aged 10 to 19, 40% by 20-somethings. But this is what parents need to know: "In his study of teen blogs, researcher David Huffaker of Georgetown University found that 20% of teens posted their full names, 67% listed their ages, 59% revealed their locations, and 61% divulged some sort of contact information." Bloggers' full names can be Googled by future college admissions decisionmakers and employers, not to mention people with ill intentions. Many kids are using photo blogs as well, such as MySpace.com, posting pictures of themselves in various states of dress (for more, see Photoblogs.org, Fotolog.net, and Forbes.com's Best Photo Blogs). BTW, you probably already know this, but one way to find out if your child is using his or her full name on the Web is to search for that full name at a few search engines.



In other teen-blogging coverage at Net Family News: "Daughter's blog, mom's dilemma"; "Kid Web developers"; "Teens' blog life"; "Marketing to kids with blogs"; and "Parents getting blogged" (think about it: a parent's prospective employer googles her and finds a disgruntled child's family tell-all).

Hip data storage?!

And what could be hip about data storage? a parent logically might ask. Well, the makers of the teen-only hip-e computer get it (see my 9/10 issue). If you're a teenage early adopter, having a "flash drive" means you can store your tunes in a lipstick-size tube dangling "from key chains and backpacks - or even from the necks of users - as if pendants signifying a cult of convenient computing," the New York Times reports. In fact, I predict flash drives will be mainstream for teenagers in no time. Because of their high capacity, IPods are used as flash drives - people store Word docs and Quicken files on them to carry back and forth between home and office PCs (the way we used to use floppy disks). Floppies stored 1.4 megabytes of data, while flash drives store 32 megabytes to 2 gigabytes, the Times explains. That's a lot of tunes and photos! Seriously, some students are required to have them for school - a dad and Office Depot manager in Annapolis, Md., discovered that recently, the Times reports, when he saw "a gaggle of teenagers" clustered around a flash drive display case.

New search tool: Clusty

The slightly odd name is for the way it "cluster searches," USA TODAY reports. "For instance, entering 'San Francisco' into Clusty.com's search box produces a set of general results at the center of the Web page, with a list of more specific categories, such as 'Bay,' 'Hotel,' 'Art,' 'University' and 'Giants' featured at the left. Clicking on any of the subgroups delivers a new list of links in the center of the page while still preserving the different groups. Ask Jeeves's Teoma.com also cluster searches, but Clusty - four years in the making - is more "sophisticated and user-friendly," USA TODAY adds. Which points to the goal all search engines are after these days: the best way to narrow down the flood of information available to us all on the Internet.

Gaming an addiction?

For some kids, reportedly. The Washington Post illustrates with one Washington state teenager's experience. After she noticed her 16-year-old was playing Socom II sometimes in the middle of the night, his mom had him work with a therapist who had about eight other gaming-addiction patients (not her main practice, but part of it). The therapist points to "the God effect" as one of the main attractions of these games for teenagers - how they empower players by giving them the feeling they're at the "center of the universe." Symptoms of addiction (to most anything) to look out for: withdrawal and isolation. Setting limits is offered as a key solution. For further information, The Post refers to Online Gamers Anonymous (the site wouldn't load when I tried to go there), and there's a sidebar, "Signs of Trouble," and the Post's roundup of articles on gaming.

4-H site by kids, for kids

National 4-H Week (10/3-9) is all about the Internet this year, because 93% of 10-to-18-year-olds "are actively online and want to find the information they need from online sources," the Monroe [Wisc.] Times reports. Part of the celebration will be the unveiling of 4-HUSA.org, redesigned over the summer by 14 teen 4-H members throughout the US. "The site features the most complete list of 4-H Web sites available, organized by state, and many interactive elements, including a national calendar of events and featured news headlines. Coming soon are games, message boards, Web logs and myname@4-Husa.org e-mail aliases," according to the Monroe Times. With some 7 million participants nationwide, 4-H is an educational program for youth 5-19 associated with the US Department of Agriculture.

RateMyTeachers.com

The site "boasts ratings for 887,000 public and private schoolteachers in four countries" and last week received its 6-millionth teacher rating, up from just 1 million about a year ago, the Christian Science Monitor reports. RateMyTeachers "relies on hundreds of student volunteers who monitor postings for accuracy and taste in the US, Canada and now Britain and Ireland," according to the Monitor. "Anyone can click a tiny red flag next to a comment to automatically remove it from the site pending review by a staff member." What do teachers think of this? The Monitor found that, generally, teachers with high ratings think it's fine, and vice versa. If nothing else, it certainly must force some soul-searching. Is that fair? One teacher mentioned in the article says yes, because teachers rate students all the time. Guess he has a point!

Kids & the new MSN Messenger

Chances are - if they already use MSN Messenger (as opposed to AOL's or Yahoo's) - your kids already have it. Even though it's not officially "in beta" (being tested by the average Net user), it's unofficially all over the place, CNET reports. Here's MSN's download page. If your child (or her whole buddy list!) is one of those early adopters, have her show you the cool new features - avatars (little animations that represent the IMer); "winks" and "nudges" (the latter makes an IM partner's screen shake); and a search bar (so IMers can search for things while chatting). Kids love to "express their personal style," as MSN's ad copy puts it, which is why it's quite likely kids will be rushing to download this latest iteration. Just make sure they don't put any personally identifiable information in their IM profiles (ask your kid if you can have a look at his profile), and go through Preferences together to see what is and isn't allowed (such as IMs from people not on their buddy list). It also never hurts to ask them who all those people (screennames) are on their buddy list - anybody they don't know? For more on this, see "IM risks & tips" in my newsletter.