AOL's new tool for parents & a Q 4 U

It will be part of America Online's Moviefone and CityGuide services, CNET reports. And it's designed to help parents decide what movies, DVDs, local events, and eventually music, games, and books are appropriate for their children. Editors at Moviefone and CityGuide will highlight events and media with the help of ratings (the MPAA's for films) and kids' media watchdog Common Sense Media. What's interesting to me is the absence of the Web in this equation. This development seems to be more about traditional media, and I wonder if that's because parents are not as concerned (yet?) about where their kids go online. Do you think the Net is less important to parents? Would you be interested in having experts rate or highlight Web sites, technologies, and online services targeting kids and teens? I would love to get your view on this - via email or a post in this blog (click on "comments" just below).

Mini's ins and outs

If you're thinking about a Mac Mini for future family computing, read yesterday's "Fast Forward" by Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro. Are you familiar with "the spinning beachball of death" (as Mac aficionados call the system-busy cursor)? If you want to copy a DVD's worth of photos to the hard drive and you don't want to spend a lot of time watching the beachball spin, you'll need twice the memory the basic Mini comes with. You'll need 512 megabytes installed at purchase (for an extra $75), since there's only one memory card slot in the Mini's mini box, Rob says (you're unlikely to want to go in and swap memory cards later on your own). The basic 256 megs do "suffice for browsing the Web while listening to an iTunes playlist," he adds. Also, to plug any mouse and keyboard (besides Apple's) into the Mini, you'll need a special $12 cable (plugging in any monitor is no problem). Read Rob's piece for more on the peripherals issues and to get a great workaround for the Mini's dearth of USB ports. He also does a little price-comparing: "There's still a difference between the start-up costs of Windows and Mac computing, but with the Mac Mini, Apple has shrunk them to the size of an ATM withdrawal, not a car payment," he says, pointing out that PC-security peace of mind might be worth the extra $15-50. Of course, that's only about viruses and spyware, not child-online-safety issues. That's another ball of wax (email me if you're not sure about the difference).

The new ChatDanger: Beyond chat

A lot of kids will tell you they know the basic online-safety rules. What they really want to know is *why to follow them.* That's what young people in the UK and Denmark told Childnet International as it was getting ready to expand and relaunch its one-of-a-kind Web site, ChatDanger.com.



One of the greatest things about kids, Childnet found in ChatDanger's first four years, is that they "want to tell others about what happened to them in order that others might learn from their experiences," said Childnet's Will Gardner, who led ChatDanger's relaunch. And that's what they did, in some of the more than 5,000 emails the site's received since 2000. Young site visitors kindly, thoughtfully told their stories - about how strangers have approached them, and in some cases threatened and exploited them, in emails, instant-messaging, gaming chats, and phone texting - so their peers wouldn't make the same mistakes. That's what young communicators will find in the new ChatDanger.com, a resource with which - as Will put it - kids can help their parents reach a certain comfort level about the new communications technologies. For more on this, please see this week's issue of my newsletter.

UK teen arrested for e-fraud

A 14-year-old Londoner described by his grandmother as "an angel" was arrested for selling 20,000 pounds ($37,800) worth of "non-existent gear" via his Web site, The Register reports. He started his e-commerce operation in a bedroom at her house. "By the time the police had tracked down the boy his operation was so successful that he had rented an office and even hired staff," according to The Register, which adds that Grandmother told the press, "He is an angel and never been in trouble. I'm going to kill him when I get hold of him."

New search perks

Yahoo, MSN, A9, Jeeves, Google, etc., are just falling all over themselves to give us new ways to search the Web. This week's developments are A9's "yellow pages" and Google's TV search. As USATODAY put it, "the yellow pages are coming to life" and we Web users now get to search for local businesses with pictures. Amazon's "A9 has added 20 million thumbnail pictures of storefronts [in the US's "top 10 markets"] to its new business directory" for when you don't remember the name of that sushi bar, but you remember its amazing cinnabar front door. Hmm - I *think* I'd use this sometimes. [Imagine what it was like to drive around 10 big cities with a digital camera taking photos of all those storefronts (that's what really happened).] Then there's Google's new feature whereby you can "search the content of television programs from the likes of PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN," InfoWorld reports, adding that it will "open up a new world of easy access to research and will ramp up search competition with Yahoo and others." Called "Google Video," it makes available the closed captioning content of a growing number of TV programs which Google's "spiders" began crawling or indexing last month.



Meanwhile, not to be outdone, AOL has improved its search engine with a new look and "better answers faster," it says. Here's SearchEngineWatch on this.

Answers, not Web sites pls

Sometimes we just want answers when we're searching the Web - not a bunch of Web pages. Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg took the time to compare various search engines' ability simply to turn up straight answers (Google has its tiny "Definition" link at the top right of many results pages, MSN Search offers direct answers with some results, and Amazon's A9 has a "reference" button that does the same). For more, Walt recommends Answers.com, a service of Israel-based GuruNet. "Using a variety of reference sources, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, [Answers.com] generates a thoughtfully organized page of relevant information about your search query without requiring you to click on any further Web links," Walt writes. There is a downside, though, he points out: The service "relies heavily on Wikipedia, which has been criticized because it isn't written or edited by experts." For more on the Wikipedia encyclopedia/community, see this balanced Washington Post piece and this fairly glowing description at USATODAY.

"The Making of a Molestor'

This New York Times Magazine article made for very tough reading (tougher to imagine how hard it was to research!) last weekend, but it points out some important facts from people who study child sexual exploitation, as well as how little we know about its causes. We know that it's "committed against perhaps 20% of girls and 5-10% of boys under the age of consent in the United States," the Times reports, but that's based on figures culled from many studies whose numbers "range widely" - e.g., "10-40% for girls and 2-15% for boys." As for causes of this behavior in adults, "what parts are played by biology, by an abuser's own childhood, by aspects of isolation in his (for males make up around 90% of offenders) current life - or by the powerful arrival of the Internet into the world of Eros?" The "quick answer" one specialist in sexual disorders gave writer Daniel Bergner was, "We don't know." But some useful questions about the Internet's role are emerging. "Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children," Bergner writes." However, psychologists are finding that the Net - with its "abundant porn and disembodied chat-room conversation" can be a "disinhibitor," as well as "a catalyst for fantasy and dangerous if the control over behavior is markedly impaired."

Teen sexuality online & off

Katie Couric and her producers at NBC did parents a service in airing NBC's hour-long special on teen sexuality last night - by fueling the public discussion about this vital part of parenting. The subject is directly linked to young people's online activities - what they talk about and how they behave in their instant messaging, blogs, and phone text messages. The special, with a follow-up this morning on "Today," was based on two complementary pieces of research: a landmark national survey (commissioned by NBC and People magazine) of young teens and their parents and a weekend-long "open forum that Couric conducted with 11 girls and nine boys, ages 13 to 16 [and their parents], in Key Biscayne, Fla.," as described by the Associated Press. The show featured insightful comments on teenagers' experience with sex from the teenagers themselves, their parents, pediatrician/author Meg Meeker, and psychologist/author Neil Bernstein. It picked up on recent reports in the media about "hooking up" and "friends with benefits" (casual sex among young people), as well as views and behaviors on abstinence, oral sex, dating, etc. Just a few important points I picked up on were kids themselves saying that the sexualization of society pressures them to grow up faster than they're ready to; the growing problem (Dr. Meeker used the word "epidemic") of sexually transmitted diseases; and teens' lack of understanding of the connection between sexual intimacy and emotional development (also brought out in a New York Times article last summer - see "Friends with benefits"). For the numbers (e.g., 27% of 13-to-16-year-olds "sexually active," but 87% have not had sexual intercourse), here's NBC's report on the survey.

Fake PC security email

Tell all the Net users at your house to delete any email they see with the subject, "MS Windows/Critical Error." It's a fake, and its attachment is a "trojan" program that - if installed - takes over your computer, ZDNET UK reports. Microsoft would undoubtedly have employed a copy editor to fix all the typos in the email. If you ever want to check to see if your family's PCs are up-to-date on Microsoft's security patches, just go to WindowsUpdate.com.



Also, don't open any attachment that says it's about a delivery confirmation - regardless of what anybody bought online. It could be a version of the old "Bagle" worm that's recirculating, according to ZDNET UK. Normal delivery confirmations usually just appear in the body of an email. Basically, tell your kids not to open *any* attachment in an email or file sent with an instant message unless they confirm beforehand with the person supposedly sending it that it's what their message says it is. Feel free to email me any questions.

Canada's Cybertip.ca launched!

Now there are two countries where parents can get immediate help, 24/7, when they feel a child is at risk online. With its just-launched national Cybertip.ca hotline, Canada joins the US's Cybertipline.com, and the UK has a somewhat similar service in the works. For its first two years just covering Manitoba, the goal of Canada's tipline "has been to collect complaints and incident reports about child sexual exploitation or luring on the Internet and forward the most serious to appropriate law enforcement agencies," Canada's CTV reports. "The pilot project gained an international reputation through word of mouth" (and virtually no marketing budget). Now the service is federally funded. According to the just-launched Web site of the UK-based Virtual Global Taskforce, the Taskforce "is piloting a scheme in the UK to allow individuals to report concerns about suspicious and/or inappropriate behaviour online" for UK residents, but - different from the US's CyberTipline.com and Canada's Cybertip.ca, it "should not be used for reporting emergencies or concerns which need an immediate response" (for that, UK parents are advised to "call 999 or contact your local police"). Both of North America's tiplines have companion toll-free phone numbers. The number of the US's CyberTipline is 800.843.5678 and Canada's Cybertip number is 866.658.9022. Here's more on how the CyberTipline works in my Web site.

Kids' blogs = 'pedophile's dream'

A lot of parents have had a hunch about this, but now an expert has voiced it: Lancashire University-based forensic psychologist Rachel O'Connell told Scotland's Parliament that online journals and picture blogs have increased the risk to online kids. "The emergence of moblogs - mobile weblogs - allowed even faster transfer of pictures to the Internet using mobile telephones with cameras," the BBC reports. That's "just a paedophile's dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life," Dr. O'Connell told Parliament. We tell our children not to give out personal information online, but we - and they - usually think that's about name, address, and phone number in an email, IM, or chatroom. Kids who blog, O'Connell pointed out, aren't thinking along those lines. Blogs are all about giving out personal information! Very personal, except that smart kids don't include their full name in posts and blog names. Still, pedophiles are experts at putting 2 and 2 together. "The parameters of grooming are now about to alter whereby they don't necessarily have to have contact with the child," O'Connell told the Scottish Parliament. The BBC continues: "She described a scenario where a group of paedophiles could exchange information on a child's movement [because of moblogs], potentially leading to an abduction." For more on this, see "Monitoring bloggers" and "Blogs booming."

Kids' Net safety: Another step

The child-porn hotlines that have developed all over Europe are doing extremely important work, but they're also a first step toward a broader goal: protecting online kids. Not just from abuse by child pornographers but also from contacts and grooming by pedophiles online. With today's launch of the Virtual Global Taskforce's Web site, the goal's a little closer. The site reflects some remarkable cooperative work. Initiated by the UK's National Crime Squad, the VGT is an international partnership between law enforcement agencies and the tech industry in Canada, the UK, Australia, the US, and Interpol (that last is the world's largest international police organization, with 182 member countries). Their goal is to "make the Internet a safer place" by fighting all forms of online abuse of children (also to make the Internet "a more hostile place for pedophiles").



The VGT's site itself aims to 1) be "a one stop shop for all information about child protection online" and 2) to help people report online child abuse. The first is a tall order for any law-enforcement Web site because so much of online-child protection is about day-to-day parenting, but there's some great info in the site, especially the six "Top Tips" on the kids' page. The site also has a ways to go on point #2. This is just one parent's perspective, but I've watched this scene for a long time and have felt that, ever since the US's CyberTipline.com went live (at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children), that's what every parent in the world should have access to in an emergency. Having a child immediately at risk online happens pretty rarely, but when it does, parents need to know where to go and there needs to be someone at the other end, 24/7. [As of this week, Canadian parents now have the Cybertip.ca, and the UK is working on something like North America's tiplines.]



CyberTipline.com and Cybertip.ca are linked to from VirtualGlobalTaskforce.com, but they're several clicks down from the home page, the word "emergency" doesn't appear anywhere, and it's not clear on the first few pages that there will be immediate help unless you call your local police (which by now, if there's an emergency, you probably already did!). It'll be great when a parent in any country can go to something like North America's hotlines and get fast action, even if it's a little advice or a local contact from a calm, expert analyst looking at a database of local law-enforcement people nationwide who know just what to do when a child is at risk online. Here's more on emergency help in my site. And here's the BBC's coverage and the VGT's press release on its new site.

AOL drops file-sharers' hangout

Even though it's one of the oldest parts of the Internet, Usenet is probably one of the parts that our kids know a lot more about than we do. At least the file-sharing ones. Usenet newsgroups (or discussion groups), according to ZDNET, are where people who like to swap free, usually bootlegged, software files (such as games) in particular go to find it. It's also where they can very easily pick up viruses, ZDNET reports, and where people have always been able to find pornography. But there's plenty of perfectly legitimate, well-meaning, sometimes weird commentary and info there too, from alt.antiques to alt.yoga. Usenet, however, reportedly has become increasingly seedy, and this week's news about it is that America Online is dropping it. By sometime next month, Usenet will no longer be accessible to its members. "It's unclear why AOL is pulling the plug on Usenet but, frankly, the neighborhood just isn't that desirable to companies that want to seem wholesome and family-friendly," writes ZDNET's Molly Brown. The Register cites an AOL spokesman saying the service was dropped because so few subscribers used it. File-sharers no doubt already have a work-around. Many Internet service providers provide access to Usenet, and "AOL users can read newsgroups over the Web using Google Groups," according to eWeek's article on this, citing a pop-up message from AOL to its subscribers about this development.

Not-so-savvy searchers

Net users are very happy with their search engines and are usually very loyal to a particular one but pretty naive about how it works. That's the basic take-away from a survey about search engine use by the Pew Internet and American Life project. You know all those "sponsored links" sometimes in a box at the top and/or side of your search results, sometimes filling the whole first screen and usually marked as such in very light grey? That companies pay to have them appear there? No? Well, you're not alone. And your kids are even less likely to know that - when doing research for school - using these paid search "results" is like using magazine ads as source material. Pew found that "only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or 'sponsored' results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not." Just another sign of how much we need media literacy education in the Internet age. Check out the answer to "Why teach media literacy to young children?" in the California Museum of Photography's site (part of the University of California, Riverside). The findings were widely covered, e.g., in the BBC, the Detroit Free Press, the San Jose Mercury News, and USATODAY.

Phishers' new hook

They're trying to hook new victims by using smaller banks' names, the Washington Post reports. Instead of Citibank and other big financial institutions, phishers - who "use fake Web sites and e-mail messages in an attempt to trick customers into disclosing valuable personal financial information" - are now going after customers of, e.g., First Federal Capital Bank in Madison, Wisc., and TCF Bank in Wayzata, Minn. They're the kinds of banks whose customers do a lot of online banking, the Post points out. So call your bank before clicking on a link in any email from "your bank." For more information, check out my Family Tech feature on foiling phishers, Dec. 17.

Filtering, etc.: Insights from reviewers

"Filters are of only limited use with chat and instant-messaging," said Josh Finer, publisher of Software4Parents.com. For these communications apps so popular among tweens and teens, "monitoring software is better." Talking with Josh and Jerry Ropelato, publisher of InternetFilterReview.com, turned up some helpful insights - not just into what various types of online-safety software can do but also into parents' current interests. [See Part 1 of this in my newsletter for an introduction to their Web services.] Josh's point about monitoring software suggests a shift in parents' concerns. A few years ago, when he started Software4Parents, Josh found that parents' No. 1 goal for buying filtering was to block online porn. Now it's just as much about contact as content - keeping strangers away from kids. For further views - on how filters how improved and where they fail - Please click to this week's issue. And do email me anytime about solutions your family has worked out, with or without technology (or click on "comments" just below and post here)!

File-sharers convicted: A first

This week saw the first convictions of file-sharers, Reuters reports. But the two middle-aged men from Texas and New York state were not your run-of-the-mill users of P2P services like Kazaa (more than 7,000 of whom have been sued by the recording industry to date). They "operated hubs in a file-sharing network that required members to share between one gigabyte and 100 gigabytes of material, the equivalent of 250,000 songs," according to Reuters. The US Justice Department said investigators downloaded material worth $25,000 from the two hubs. Both men pleaded guilty to felony copyright infringement, and they each face up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, with sentencing due in late April. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that file-sharing is not only here to stay but - even as they continue suing file-swappers - media corporations are working on ways to capitalize on the phenomenon. Also, legal downloading is soaring, with sales of pay-per-tune songs having "shot up more than tenfold in 2004," according to the BBC.



BTW, parents of digital music fans, here are a few aids and heads-ups: a little primer from the Washington Post, explaining formats, retailers, and tune players; Wired magazine's inside look at wildly popular P2P service BitTorrent and its creator; the latest global figures on file-sharing at itWorldCanada.com; BBC confirmation that new, harder-to-detect P2P services are popping up all the time; and the Associated Press on how movie file-swapping's a little different from the music P2P scene.

UK: Cell phone for kids cancelled

UK-based mobile phone distributor Communic8 Ltd. took its phone for 4-to-8-year-olds, the "MYMO," off the market "over safety fears," The Register reported. In announcing the move, Communic8 cited a report from the UK's National Radiological Protection Board that reignited concerns about cell phone safety. "Although there's no proof to show that they pose a damage to people's health, experts at the UK government-appointed National Radiological Protection Board (NRPD) warned people to continue to take a 'precautionary' approach to their use of mobile phones," particularly use by children and other "potentially vulnerable sub-groups," according to an earlier article on this at The Register. Cell-phone figures for young Britons are pretty amazing: One-quarter of all elementary schoolers and 90% of 11-to-16-year-olds own mobile phones, according to the London Times.

Student tech support: Win-win

As computer use grows the burden on school IT departments isn't - at least not in the Natchez-Adams School District in southwestern Mississippi. There, 25 high school students provide tech support for the entire district, the Natchez Democrat reports. Their work in classrooms and offices is the hands-on part of a two-year "computer system technology" course the high school provides, one of 10 such programs in the state. The first year is more about hardware, the second about software and the Internet. The benefits to schools, with mounting computer- and network-servicing costs, and students, with ambitions to start computer science and software engineering careers, are obvious. In fact, a 2003 National School Boards Foundation study found that 60% of US high schools have "students performing maintenance and troubleshooting on computers," according to the Raleigh, N.C.-based Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning. Here's a page about "Generation TECH," providing schools with guidelines for establishing a student tech support program. For a student perspective, here's an interview at 4Teachers.org with the "Fab 5" student tech support team for the Sedgewick, Ks., school district in 2000-01. But these young techies are probably already aware of the one potential downside, as chronicled here in CNET: the unintended life-long side job of tech support for great-aunts, second cousins, and their "best friends."

PCs in family rooms?

Microsoft and other companies want to turn the PC into an entertainment hub - let families watch TV or a DVD, display their trip's slide show, and listen to music all with a PC in the family room, the New York Times reports. Ok. That consolidation can't hurt on general principle, but our family really doesn't need to have it all happen on one big screen. What happens in our family room is everybody sort of watching something on the big screen while one family member surfs the Web or instant-messages his friends (with a wirelessly connected laptop). We like having that little screen in the family room, too, so we have the IM-er with us and so we can generally keep tabs on kids' online activities. So we really don't mind having separate screens for TV/film and the Internet. How does it work at your house, though? Does having everything on one screen make sense for your family? The Times does report that there are other drawbacks to having the PC set up as a media center - for example, the picture quality of the video on the screen (so far). But read the Times article for a good look at all the arguments, pro and con.

Schools & cyberbullying

Harassment and bullying can take on "a new and ominous tone" when it happens online, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. Especially when online "buddies" encourage a despondent young person, such as Ryan Halligan (who reportedly found solace in the anonymity of Net communications), to commit suicide in October 2003. His dad, "an IBM manager who built his own computers, [John] Halligan, of Essex Junction, Vt., thought he knew the risks of letting his son have a computer in his bedroom. His ground rules were clear: no talking to strangers, no sharing of passwords or personal information." Those are good rules, and Ryan's case was at a terrible extreme end of online harassment. But it had one point of intersection with so many young people's encounters with strangers online: very often they don't feel people whom they only know online (have never met in person) are strangers (see "Rethinking 'stranger danger'"). Much more common is an anecdote cited further down in the Inquirer piece: "Earlier this month at Titus Elementary School in Warrington, Bucks County, sixth graders listened intently to a story about Alex, a teen in the county whose classmates created a Web site titled simply 'Reasons to Hate Alex'." The school is now taking part in a new training program on how to deal with cyberbullying, "created for schools to meet a growing demand."



In a recent story from Baton Rouge, La.-based WAFB TV, three high school students were arrested in a cyberbullying case. "A 15-year-old female student created a Web site called 'Lorangersbiggestqueer.com.' The Web site featured pictures of a 14-year-old male student. He responded with his own Web site, which investigators say included a list of students he called 'The Preps,' and poems so graphically violent, investigators say 'they crossed the line'." For more on this (and one Net-savvy school counselor's handling of IM-based harassment), see "The IM life of middle-schoolers."

Online safety in Shreveport (La.)

"Don't be intimidated by your lack of computer knowledge," is part of the sound advice police Lt. Bill Duncan tells parents in his Shreveport-area online-safety talks. He tells them to "talk to their kids" so they'll be more willing to tell them what's going on in their lives - including their online experiences," the Shreveport Times reports. One mother who attended a Duncan talk told the Times she went home and did just that, and - although her teenage daughter is "very computer savvy," some of the points made in the online-safety presentation was news to the girl, which surprised her mom. That's the funny thing about technology and human nature. We seem to assume that if someone else knows more than we do about tech, they somehow know all there is to know. This is especially not the case with the Internet. It's so vast, so many different media - from information (news, advice, advertising) to communications (email, IM, chat, discussion boards, VoIP telephony) to gaming (little games at PBS Kids and NickJr to massively multiplayer big-kid games with chat), and so on - that each person really only know the little corners of it s/he uses on a daily basis. Plus, as I learned from Dr. Herb Lin, who led a major mid-'02 study at the National Research Council on "Youth, Pornography, & the Internet", parents and kids use the Internet differently, so each has his and her own area of expertise, and it's risky to make assumptions about each other's online activities. [For more from Herb, see "Dial-up's just fine, thanks" and "Family Tech," 9/5/03.]

Apple suing teenager

Now he's 19 and a Harvard student, but Nicholas Ciarelli was 13 when he first started annoying Apple by building a Web site that published "insider news and rumors about Apple," the Washington Post reports. His Web site, ThinkSecret.com, now generates millions of pageviews a month from Apple's "legendarily zealous fans," the Post adds. "After a series of letters warning the Web site to stop publishing proprietary information, Apple decided enough was enough." Apparently, it was Nicholas's prediction that Apple would come out with a computer for less than $500 (the Mac Mini) and other tip-offs that sparked Apple's lawsuit "accusing him of illegally misappropriating trade secrets." [Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the Mini at MacWorld last week - see my news brief.] How does Nicholas get this information? Just like any journalist, he says - by talking to "sources" and following up and confirming hunches or things he hears. Of course, some sources could be disgruntled Apple employees posting inside info at ThinkSecret.com. Addendum: The latest news is that Terry Gross, a San Francisco-based lawyer "specialising in freedom of speech and the Internet," is taking up Nicholas's defense free of charge. That's from the Associated Press Thursday, 1/20.

Parents monitor online kids

A whopping 95% of US parents surveyed said they monitor their children's online activities, "mainly out of concern for inappropriate content and predators," Newsday reports. Another surprising finding was that nearly 75% of parents "are present when their children go online." One dad told Newsday that he'd discovered "his high-speed connection allows his children to surf the Web using any browser, avoiding MSN and its parental controls" and that a Google search could turn up porn sites (he must not know about filtered searching - see the paragraph beginning "We're surprised teachers..." in my 4/30/04 issue). Among other survey findings:



* "More than a third of parents examine the Web browser history to see which sites their children visited."

* "A fifth use parental controls to limit sites children can visit, and many parents use a combination of monitoring techniques."

* "Most computers that children use in the home are in common areas, such as the den, the report found" (just 13% said their children use computers in their own rooms).

* Less than 25% of parents have imposed no time restrictions on kids' Net use. Restrictions are imposed to create balance in children's activities, for their health, and to give other family members time at the computer.

* Among kids 6-12, nearly 75% go online for school work, "but an even greater proportion for fun. For teens, school-related Net use is No. 1, though "fun" is high on the list.

* 75% of teens communicate via email and 63% via instant messaging.



The findings are from the Board's latest Consumer Internet Barometer, a quarterly measure of who's doing what on the Internet which "covers 10,000 households." Here's their press release.

Help in finding filters

If they've decided to use filtering or monitoring software, busy parents usually want to know yesterday which one to buy. No hemming and hawing, thank you very much. Though my little nonprofit doesn't have the resources to test all the online-safety products out there, I can definitely point out some very credible sites that do - they specialize in picking the best and making your job much easier.... (please click to this week's issue of my newsletter for more).

Monitoring teen bloggers

The headline of this Detroit News article is not news to a lot of parents: "Teens spill deep secrets in Web logs." But these articles in local papers always offer insights. This one leads with an online journal entry from West Bloomfield High School sophomore Rachel Hines, "one of millions of American teenagers now turning to the Web, writing in online journals, also known as live journals, Web logs, or simply blogs." [Rachel told the paper that she thought about 60% of the people in her school have blogs.] Her blog entry's innocuous, but some go into great detail about teenagers' sex lives, family members, drug use, etc., "blurring the line between public and private life." It's like they're making themselves the stars of their peer group's own reality TV show. Or just "venting" - "getting their frustrations out," as Rachel put it. For some teenagers, that can mean victimization - online harassment or cyberbullying (see "Cyberbullying more harmful to kids" and my series, "The IM life of middle-schoolers"). On the other hand, "some experts laud online journals because they get students to write and as a place where they can try out personalities and test boundaries in a virtual world they often find safer than the physical one," the News reports. What do you think about online journals - does your child blog, do you check in on it every now and then? (Rachel's mom doesn't read her blog - "I decided it was her private thing," she told the News.) Do send in your comments and experiences (or post here by clicking on "comments" just below)!

Kids in K-8: Web design contest!

"They consider themselves technology mavens. They can write HTML as quickly as their book reports. Their creative ideas for Web content are endless. And they aren't even in high school yet," the press release goes. One of these mavens just may be at your house or school. If so, don't hesitate to have them enter their work in a national contest to find "'America's Youngest Web Wizards' - K-8th graders who have designed Web sites with extraordinary creativity." Its sponsor is Hostway, an international Web hosting company. Winners (one student from grades K-5 and one from 6-8) will receive a Dell laptop, a year of free Web site hosting, and national recognition for their Web work. The deadline is February 28, and winners will be announced March 31. For more information, go to Hostway's Web Wizards page.

Spam law: How's it doing?

The FTC this week "struck the first blow against porn spammers by using provisions in the federal CAN-SPAM Act to convince a Nevada judge to freeze the assets of several companies and five men accused of spewing pornographic emails," InternetWeek.com reported. The law requires porn spammers to label their emails as such (so people wouldn't open them by mistake), and these companies had failed to do that. Here's an earlier article from the Washington Post explaining the law and why it's had mixed results. [See my 5/21 issue for a report on how much UK kids are exposed to porn spam at school.] Meanwhile, according to AOL, anyway, we're getting less spam overall now. "AOL also said [it] received 2.2 million spam complaints from its subscribers in November, down from 11 million for the same month a year ago," the Washington Post reported.

Oz teens arrested in Net scam

Four Sydney high school students aged 15-17 have been charged with participation in a Russia-based Internet scam, the Associated Press reported. The scammers stole "stole people's banking passwords and siphoned cash [$457,000] into accounts in eastern Europe," according to the AP. "The four students were promised a cut of the profits for letting their bank accounts be used for laundering money stolen from Internet bankers via a computer virus that dropped a program for secretly recording passwords." The students were among 13 Australians arrested in connection with the scam by the time AP filed. Australian police said the students were targeted "because they were naive."

Young phoners in debt

A lot of parents have been there: opened up a cell-phone provider's bill to find hundreds of dollars of charges staring them in the face. One example is the family of Chaz Albert, whose cell-phone bill last month was $400, $320 of it his charges, the New York Times reports. The real culprit: text messaging. At $.10 an outgoing message and $.02 for each incoming one, its cost is sneaking up on kids (and parents) everywhere, now that "texting" is all the rage in the US (it has been among European and Asian youth for years). The Times cites Forrester Research findings that "Americans sent 2.5 billion text messages a month in mid-2004, triple the number sent in mid-2002." The problem is, the cell phone companies' salespeople sometimes fail to tell new customers about the costs of texting. And what a lot of people don't know is, you can call up Customer Service and have them turn texting off altogether for any phone on your family plan. But if you want your kids to learn the hard way, the Times cites an upside: "For some young people, the cellphone ordeals, though painful, have proved valuable. What is left, it seems, after the bills are paid and the family tensions subside is the emergence of a new maturity when it comes to money." Not to mention some kids graduating from high school with cell-phone debt.

New: The lean, clean little Mac

This time Apple's got us family computer users in mind for sure. Yesterday it introduced the Mac Mini, and it really is mini in terms of both price and size (here are photos at CNET). Priced at $499 and $599 (for an 80-GB hard drive instead of 40-GB), it's "a tiny machine with a processor, hard drive and optical drive - you supply the monitor, mouse and keyboard," CNET reports. According to the New York Times, "while computers have long been sold as machines that can turn a home into an office, most Americans now use them in their bedrooms and kitchens as e-mail terminals; as hubs for playing music, storing and editing photos; and as stations for navigating the Web.... [The Mini] is aimed squarely at the needs of this new digital household." But not just because of its size and price (which, with peripherals will be closer to $1,000 than $500), methinks. They'll just clinch the switch to Apple for a lot of families looking for simpler, more pest-free computing and surfing experiences. I'm seeing very little about this key PC-security aspect of what Apple offers in the mountain of media coverage the Mini announcement got worldwide. For families with care-free young surfers downloading all kinds of stuff, computer security is becoming huge. Here's the BBC, PC Magazine, and the Washington Post's roundup of many other reports. (BTW: If you buy one of these and don't mind using an old PC monitor you have lying around the house, you can really keep the cost down - a spanking-new Apple mouse and keyboard can be had for about $60.)



This just in (1/13): Here's an excellent analysis at CNET, comparing (in terms of price) a fully tricked-out Mac Mini to a Dell, Gateway, or HP PC with all the features a typical family would want (e.g., monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers). The Mini comes out to about $100 more (but less if you already have a monitor you can plug into it). BTW, this is the only piece I've seen that addresses the Mini's PC security advantage, saying a lot of people who find themselves doing all the family tech support may just go out and buy one (out of their allowance!). ;-)

Microsoft's new patches: Git 'em!

Microsoft issued two new critical patches today and one of next-to-the-highest level of importance. "A hacker could exploit one of the security flaws if a user directed the Web browser to a specially designed Web page," Reuters reports, saying the patches are part of the company's monthly PC security bulletin. Be sure to download them if you have a Windows PC. Go to the company's Windows Update page to check if you need them. If so, you can click once to download the three patches. Also, here's the new page, available just today, where you can scan your PC for virus infection, as I reported last week ("Microsoft's free help for PC pests").

Schools lack Net savvy: Report

American schools have plenty of technology now, but not enough understanding of how to make the most of it in educating students, according to a just-released report from the US Department of Education, "Toward a New Golden Age in American Education: How the Internet, the Law and Today's Students Are Revolutionizing Expectations." "In the realm of technology, the educational community is playing catch-up. Industry is far ahead of education. And tech-savvy high school students often are far ahead of their teachers," DOE says in one of its conclusions, adding elsewhere that "we need to listen to America's students" because of their tech savvy (this is the intro to a section on "Student Voices" that includes a feedback blog). Coverage at USATODAY and CNET cited some arresting stats in the report: "9 in 10 children between 5 and 17 use computers, and even higher numbers of online teenagers use the Net for school-related work"; " 72% of all first graders used a home computer on a weekly basis during their summer breaks" and "the largest group of new Net users from 2000 to '02 were 2-to-5-year-olds, closely followed by 6-to-8-year-olds. In the process, students have become educators' toughest critics" (that last from CNET). The DOE points to ed-tech "success stories" at schools in a dozen states.

For young cell-phoners

Disney is clearly anticipating younger and younger cell-phone customers - or maybe teenagers will find it very cool to have Mickey say "answer your phone" when someone calls. Instead of a "brrrring" or a tune, soon phone users will be able to download the voices of Disney characters as "ringtones," to the tune of $2.50, CNET reports. For example, Goofy will say, "Hello? Is anybody there?" and Mr. Incredible, "Hello? Yeah, I'm Mr. Incredible." Other voices will include Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pooh and Tigger, as well as Stitch, Woody, and Buzz Lightyear. And musical ringtones (from Finding Nemo and Aladdin) and phone screensavers are also in the works, according to CNET. The phenomenon is not unlike the "skins" and other customizing features kids love to use to customize the look of their IMs and instant-messaging services.

Family tech at turn-of-the-year

"We're swimming in doodads and options - text messaging and search engines, Blackberries and blogs, Wi-fi, cell phones that try to do all of the above, and the promise that we haven't seen anything yet," the Seattle Times reports. Yet, this flood of "convenience" makes a lot of us feel uneasy - our children less so, however. Is this low-grade concern-in-the-background just a grown-up thing - part of not having childhoods with one foot in cyberspace, playing with all the technologies that turn it into a social scene, insta-library, and entertainment service? It's hard to say - there hasn't been a lot of research on this question. Fortunately, someone uniquely qualified - Prof. David Levy at the University of Washington, who did his PhD work at Stanford in computer science and artificial intelligence - is looking into this question of how technology affects our quality of life. For more on this and further links, please see my latest newsletter.

Microsoft's free help with PC pests

Microsoft is now offering anti-spyware software for free (while it's in beta testing), at least until this summer, CNET reports. Here's the download page. It sounds like a neat product: "The look and feel of the anti-spyware beta is similar to those of products from vendors such as McAfee and Norton, which offer people the ability to launch manual scans for unwanted applications and to program the tool to run automated searches. Microsoft's application is designed to monitor all system and software changes made to a particular computer and launches pop-up announcements to let customers know when the system has detected an attempt to install spyware," according CNET. That's more than other free spyware programs do, such as Ad-Aware and Spybot. Here's Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg's year-end "Primer on Fighting Spyware." [From the Music to Our Ears Dept., Washington Post techie Rob Pegoraro writes in his helpful article, "Six Steps to Safer Surfing": "It's completely feasible to put a computer on the Internet - even one running Windows, the most attacked, least secure operating system around - and never suffer a single successful attack."]



Anti-virus help is also available at Microsoft.com for free, the Associated Press reports. The software, which Microsoft said could be downloaded from its site yesterday (here), removes viruses rather than prevents infection, so you'll still need security software like that of McAfee's or Symantec's, at least until Microsoft starts selling software that competes with these (probably second half of '05, according to the AP). The free virus-removal software will be automatically updated monthly, Microsoft says. Here's ZDNET's review of other virus-prevention products. For AOL's offerings in this area, see "$14.95 for peace of mind" and "AOL's PC security reviewed."

Phone texting & disaster relief

As popular a leisure activity phone texting is in Europe and Asia (and increasingly among teens in the US), it has become an important tool in dealing with natural disasters. "The messages can get through [and did in the tsunami's aftermath in Asia last week] even when the cell phone signal is too weak to sustain a spoken conversation," the BBC reports. And SMS (for "short message service" or phone-texting) networks can handle a lot more traffic than cell-phone or land-line networks, it adds. Plus, even where there's no Internet cafe and land lines are down, there's almost always someone who has a mobile phone to get word out (or in). The BBC tells the story of Sanjaya Senanayake with Sri Lankan TV (also a blogger). "He was one of the first on the scene after the tsunami destroyed much of the Sri Lankan coast. Cell phone signals were weak. Land lines were unreliable. So Mr Senanayake started sending out text messages. The messages were not just the latest news they were also an on-the-ground assessment of 'who needs what and where'." Read the BBC piece to see how Sanjaya and Dan Lane, "a text message guru" in the UK are creating the "Alert Retrieval Cache," a system to "link those in need with those who can help." [This is a little off topic for Net Family News, but age isn't an issue, here - your child could well be the next Sanjaya Senanyake or Dan Lane (next week, not necessarily when s/he's grownup, certainly!).]

Blogs booming (teens' too)

A sure sign that blogging has arrived was the news that a blog called Tsunami Help was among the Top 10 most visited humanitarian sites by January 1. According to Web traffic monitor HitWise.com, it was No. 10 in a list that included RedCross.org, UNICEF.org, UN.org, and TheChildHealthSite.org. That's on top of news from the latest Pew Internet & American Life report that - even though 62% of US Net users don't know what a blog is - 27% (or 32 million Americans) read blogs, a 58% jump in less than a year, and 27% have created blogs (we suspect a lot of them are teenagers). Here's the BBC on this news, reported by all the tech news outlets. As for the Web as a whole, here's the New York Times on how Lisa Bauman, a nurse in Austin, Texas, used the Net to search for relatives traveling in Indonesia when the tsunami struck - a search that illustrated both the Net's "extraordinary reach" and its limitations ("Finally, on Thursday night, her mother reached Mr. Bauman by telephone and learned that all in the family were fine," the Times reports).



For insights into the teen version of the blog culture, see "
"http://www.netfamilynews.org/nl040116.html#2">Teens' blog life," "Xanga & other teen hangouts," and a mom writing about her daughter's online journal, or blog.

A 'virtual' teacher's view

"Some educators are aghast when I explain how delighted I was to receive my world-literature student's proposal to film a documentary instead of the standard analytical essay on 'The Epic of Gilgamesh.' The ancient Sumerian legend of a man devastated by the death of his closest friend resonated deeply with my student, who had recently witnessed the murder of her best friend. Her work on this documentary ensures that she'll never forget the Sumerian king and his sorrow, so like her own," writes Melissa Hart in the Christian Science Monitor. This is just a taste of the extraordinary rapport Melissa - an English and history teacher at Ojai, Calif.-based Laurel Springs [online] School - seems to have developed with her distant students, contrary to the pronouncement of one educator of elite young athletes that virtual school "offers endless possibilities," but "you will never have that wonderful teacher who inspires you for life." If you click to Melissa's commentary, be sure to get all the way to the bottom. BTW, she has taught championship figure-skaters, young Hollywood actors, Olympic hopefuls, and world travelers, as well as recovering drug and alcohol addicts, victims of bullies, and children who are in bereavement and chronically ill - "students for whom a traditional five-day-a-week school is impractical."

Virtual tourists

Have you taken a virtual tour of a university with a high school student at your house? If so, you're in good company. In the latest of the Pew Internet & American Life project's reports on Americans' online activities and pursuits, it found that 45% of US adults online (54 million people) have taken a virtual tour - 2 million people on a typical day. Popular destinations include museums, tourist and vacation locales (e.g., the White House and the Taj Mahal), colleges and prep schools, real estate, historical exhibits, parks and nature preserves, and hotels and motels. Here's the San Jose Mercury News on this. Other recent Pew findings about Americans' online activities include:



* 53 million US adults use instant-messaging. *How* people use IM "varies widely across the age groups. Of interest to parents: Younger people use IM "not only as a way to expand and remain connected their social circle, but also as a form of self-expression, through use of customized away messages, profiles and buddy icons." They use these expressive tools "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."

* 26% of US adult Net users (33 million people) have rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system.

* 84% have used search engines (107 million people), and 87% of those say the find the info they want most of the time.