ChatRoulette: Heads up, parents!

"If I were still an unpopular 12-year-old, my first ChatRoulette session might have crushed me for a year instead of just an hour," writes Sam Anderson in New York magazine in the mildest possible description of a site that Brad Stone of the New York Times just discovered was created by a 17-year-old in Moscow. It's a video site that "brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world," Anderson writes. Comments from email correspondents of mine confirm what he writes that about 10% of the videos that stream past are of naked males not just sitting in front of their Webcams. Stone writes, "Parents, keep your children far, far away." Anderson adds, "There's no way to manage the experience.... It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom" with a powerful curiosity factor. And there are serious privacy issues, he adds. Because once you click "Play" on the home page, your computer's Webcam is activated, and you are among those streaming across other ChatRoulette players' screens, with any one of them able to grab a shot of your face and whatever else is within the frame of your Webcam.

Another heads-up: ChatRoulette's not only going viral (300 users in December, 10,000 by end of January, now 20,000 any given night), it's a group thing (hopefully not the new "Truth or Dare" or "Spin the Bottle"). When a friend came over to experience it with him, Anderson reports "the experience was different ... easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours." As voyeuristic as it might've felt, it wasn't all "shock porn," he writes. "We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer.... We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco." And another email correspondent of mine just heard over the weekend that ChatRoulette is being played by "some of our middle schoolers in [the US state of] Georgia." There may shortly be a spike in Web-filtering sales!

School filters & students' workarounds

Not surprisingly, students seem to agree with Ofsted – though perhaps sometimes for different reasons ;-) – that "locked down" filtering at school isn't the best (see this about Ofsted's report). "Many young people are using 'proxy servers' to get round their schools' internet security systems, " the BBC reports, adding that students' use of these free school-filtering workarounds is on the rise. "It sounds like an obscure, techy area of computing that only geeks would know about. But when we asked pupils in one secondary school classroom who had heard of proxy servers, every hand went up." School filters can block access to known proxy sites, but there are so many and new ones pop up so constantly that it's almost impossible for the school systems to keep up. What most students aren't aware of, the BBC reports, is the security risks associated with some of these proxy sites. Some of them send Trojan software that installs monitoring applications on the computer a student's using which captures passwords and other keystrokes. For a US version of this story, see a commentary in the Washington Post last summer. Of course, the ultimate workaround is a mobile phone or wi-fi-equipped handheld device like the iPod Touch with a Web browser, and – despite school bans – their numbers are growing probably proportionately to overall smart-phone market growth. Banning phones in school is about as effective as the Ofsted report found rigid or "locked down" filtering to be. Instead, schools should embrace and teach with these devices and technologies so students can learn and practice wise use (see "From digital disconnect to mobile learning"). That helps develop the 24/7 cognitive "filter" in their heads that improves with practice and is as flexible as their use of technology is (see this).

YouTube's new tool for kid-safe viewing

More than 33 billion online videos were watched during December and about a third of the them were on YouTube, according to comScore's latest figures. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that YouTube was 2-to-11-year-olds' No. 1 video viewing site (see this). So parents will probably be happy to know that YouTube now has its own filter for sexually explicit or violent content. "While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site," says the YouTube blog. As their video demo shows, it's easy to activate: Just go to any YouTube page, scroll to the bottom, and click "Safety Mode is off." After clicking On or Off, you can choose either to "Save" or "Save and lock." With the former, Safety Mode is on whenever anybody's uses that browser on that computer until they change that setting (works with a rule that settings don't get changed and obedient kids). "Save and lock" allows you to log into your Google or YouTube account and lock the setting so that it can't be changed in that browser by anyone who doesn't know your password – just as with Google's SafeSearch lock (see this). [See also "Help with cyberbullying on YouTube."]

China requires filtering in schools

Perhaps a sign that there are more and more computers in the schools of this giant developing country that has more Internet users than the US has population, China is now requiring Net-filtering in schools. "According to the Ministry of Education, local education departments and schools should guide students in different age groups to 'properly handle cyber world' and encourage them to report any suspicious websites" as part of its anti-porn campaign, DigitalJournal.com reports. The basic difference between this development in China and the US's school filtering is a law passed in 2000 (the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA) that required schools receiving federal "e-rate" technology subsidies to employ filtering. I was surprised that the Chinese government, well-known for its Net censorship skills (when my family was traveling there in 2008, we couldn't access our travel blog on what was then a very new blogging service called Vox.com), was only now instituting school filtering – which is why I think this is more a sign of better tech and other resources in Chinese schools than an oversight on the government's part. China may be "catching up" on the sexting front too: Digital Journal cites China's Xinhua news service as reporting that "China Mobile, the nation's largest mobile network carrier, said sending mobile porn, either through photos or messages, could have the phone number revoked permanently." As for those Net-use numbers, the San Jose Mercury News reports that China has 384 million Internet users. "The number of people going online by mobile phone rose 106% [last year] to 233 million" (8% of whom access the Net only by phone).

New tool for keeping Web searches safe

A few simple household rules can help kids at your house avoid stumbling upon inappropriate Web content: 1. If you're not absolutely sure of a URL, don't just type it into the browser window. Use a search engine. 2. Use only our family's search-engine pick (one that offers filtered search). 3. Nobody changes the settings or preferences in the search engine. We've had these rules at our house for years, and they've worked great (we're fortunate to have a pretty rule-abiding crew). But now one search engine, Google, has made family rule compliance a lot easier: It has a new feature that lets parents lock the computers kids use into the strictest SafeSearch setting (as long as Google's the search-engine pick, of course). All parents need to do is log into their Google account on any computer the kids use, click on Settings, then Search Settings in the upper right-hand corner of the page. On the page that takes you to, scroll down to SafeSearch Filtering and click "Lock SafeSearch." The rest will be clear. But here's a little 95-sec. demo. The only thing to remember is that you need to do this with any browser used on that computer – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. This is a lighter touch with parental controls that might be a good place to start (and some parents may find it meets their household adult-content-blocking needs). We've found that tech tools are best used when layered on top of parent-child discussions about what is and isn't appropriate for our family and why. Here's Google's Help page on the locking tool.

Filters for classroom management?

No. Really not a good use for filters, writes instructional technologist Bud Hunt at St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado, where they've been filtering less since the beginning of the school year. Hunt's thoughtful response to requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom is that "we will no longer use the Web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem." Hunt later adds that the best filters in a classroom are the people in it. I do agree. Here's why – but don't miss Bud's complete response to technological-classroom-management requests, linked to above. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with filtering, just with uncritical use of it, or any technology. [See also "Filtering critics, issues in 3 countries."]

School libraries: Vital filter developers

Actually, the library is both a filter and a developer of the most effective filter there is: the software between students' ears (as my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid first put it years ago). It's a great filter as school's nerve center of media competency and literacy (hopefully including new media as well as the traditional kind).

As for the filter the library helps develop in students' heads: If properly developed, it can guide and empower them the rest of their lives. Its other pluses:

Comes universally pre-installed, free of charge

Has no socio-economic barriers to "adoption"

Is automatically customized in micro detail as it's used

Works at the "operating system" level

Not only doesn't conflict with, but supports and enhances, all other "applications"

Improves with use

Is the No. 1 online-safety tool.

Critical thinking – about what one is posting, producing, and uploading as well as reading, consuming, and downloading – has never been more important for personal and academic success because of the flood of media flowing to and from the Internet's most active and social users, youth. But now – because media is also social, or behavioral – media literacy is also protective. If it teaches critical thinking about incoming social influencing (by friends, ex-friends, advertisers, predators – see this) and about their own behavior in social media, media literacy will go far in helping students have enriching, constructive experiences online and offline now and in the future. Critical thinking about one's behavior in and with media is protective because people who engage in aggressive behavior are more than twice as likely to be victimized in social media, researchers reported in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine in 2007.

So I hope schools are engaged in an important shift, not entirely away from tech filters, but at least toward understanding how vital librarians and other media-literacy teachers are to students' safe, constructive use of media and technology. [Besides, in many schools, tech filters are "knee-high fences" that only trip up adults at school (see this commentary in the Washington Post).] I see librarians in a key role of helping administrators, parents, and teachers of all subjects to 1) see the value and effectiveness of the cognitive filter, 2) loosen dependency on tech filtering and other tech "panaceas," and 3) become comfortable with social media. Then schools will be free to do for new media what they've done for traditional media for centuries: guide and enrich students' experience with them (see "School & social media: Uber big picture").

As Joyce Kasman Valenza and Doug Johnson recently wrote in School Library Journal, "It is the best time in history to be a librarian," but they seem to share my sense of urgency about the need for everybody, including librarians, to understand why.

[I guess I've been thinking about this so much lately because School Library Journal just published my view of "online safety 3.0" here.]

Related links

Here's a librarian who's clearly developing that filter. The article doesn't say if she's folding the behavioral part of new media into her literacy instruction (critical thinking about what students are uploading, sharing, and producing as well as downloading and reading), but she probably is.

The 2009 small, medium, and large school districts honored for technology performance in Converge magazine

I'd love librarians' feedback on this proposed definition of new media lit.

Of new media literacy in Europe

President Obama and new media literacy

The media literacy part of parenting

A new online safety: The means not the end

1 view of kids' top Web searches

Though some of the news coverage called the results of Symantec's survey of kids' Web searches "shocking," I don't think they'd surprise too many parents (or anyone who was once a kid). The results suggest that kids really like watching videos on YouTube, want to sell stuff and make a little money, are curious about sex and certain body parts, like social-network sites a lot, want the latest on certain celebrities like Miley Cyrus and the Twilight stars, and are looking for the latest video from Fred, the uber-popular kid character on YouTube with the really high voice. Though we all remember a developmentally appropriate interest in sex when we were kids, one reason why "sex" and "porn" were in the Top 10 (spots 4 and 6, respectively) could well be kids testing the system: the study was of young people with a monitoring product called OnlineFamily.Norton installed on their computers. Symantec, which makes the product, isn't releasing the number of kids in the study (though it said the results are based on 3.5 million queries by those 8-to-13-year-olds). The software, which parents configure for kids' maturity levels, alerts the account holder when a child tries to access inappropriate sites (involving violence, sex, drugs, etc.), but what I like about it is that it's designed as a source of talking points for family discussion about the online part of kids' lives. Ideally, that's the best use of monitoring software (and it can be a good deterrent when kids know it's installed).

One little surprising thing about the survey noted in a great analysis at ReadWriteWeb was that kids were searching for easy-to-remember URLs like Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo. "Some may say that this points to children not entirely grasping the way internet addresses work, but it's more likely an example of the trend where search has replaced typing in URLs for navigating the net." Here's coverage at the BBC and Reuters.

Sensible new home filtering option

Filtering software has long been a useful tool in family Net-safety toolboxes, especially in households with young kids. But in these times of proliferating Net-connected devices, filtering that's only on computers has an ever smaller footprint on kids' online lives. One solution, then, is filtering on the router - that gateway between the Internet and all the devices on a family's network, from consoles connected to Xbox Live to iPod Touches to laptops. Within about a month, parents will be able to buy Netgear routers with filtering, reports Larry Magid of CBS/CNET. "Like other filtering products, parents have control over the type of content blocked and have the ability to turn it off so that it doesn't prevent Mom or Dad from visiting any sites. There is also a 'white list' feature that allows parents to exclude any site from the blocked list," Larry writes, adding: "Because the blocking lists are 'in the cloud' [instead of on any particular device], parents can configure the filter from anywhere." If you already have a Netgear router, depending on the model, you might be able to upgrade it with the filtering starting August 10 – check with Netgear. But you know there are no parental panacea's where Net safety's concerned, right? This doesn't work with smart phones with Web browsers that connect via cellular networks. For that, you need to see what parental controls your cellphone company offers.

Filtering critics, issues in 3 countries

Teachers, not students, are the people most affected by school filters, according to a commentary in the Washington Post - even though the US federal law requiring filtering by schools receiving federal connectivity funding (the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA) is aimed at protecting students from inappropriate content. "Walk the halls of a public school, and students will readily share tips for evading filters, some of which would be good work-arounds for the Great Firewall of China," writes Justin Reich, a former high school teacher working on his PhD in education at Harvard. He tells of a high school student who recent showed him a Facebook group called "How to access Facebook from school" that has 187,000 members and offers simple methods for filter-free surfing and profile updating. A teacher told me once that, when she needs to get to a site that her school filter blocks, she just asks one of her students to help her.

So one question is, if this view of filtering as blunt-instrument solution is or becomes widespread, what replaces it? One idea might be school-network monitoring. More than 1,000 UK schools have monitoring software running on their networks (probably mostly alongside filtering software). Are US schools using this technology as much? Should monitoring become more of a focus in schools - to allow administrators to identify problem spots, have the "evidence" they need to work through cases of cyberbullying and harassment? What do you think? Is the choice blanket filtering (that's less than effective as a student-protection measure) or dealing with situations as they come up? See my slightly related post, "Zero tolerance = zero intelligence: Juvenile judge." (Post comments here or in the ConnectSafely.org forum, or you can always email me at anne (at) netfamilynews.org.)

And questions about filtering aren't being aired in the US only, of course. The BBC reports that, over in the UK, school regulatory body Becta just released a report which found that Net technology and devices is getting more sophisticated than the filters UK schools use, which often filter what's being downloaded only to computers (rather than mobile phones, iPod Touches, and other portable devices) and based solely on keyword, not image, detection. The report also pointed out that filters just block - they don't alert anybody to efforts to bypass the filtering. And in Australia, children's advocacy groups are criticizing the government for spending $33 million on mandatory nationwide household filtering, Australian IT reports. "Both Save the Children Australia and the National Children's & Youth Law Centre believe the resources could be better spent on law enforcement agencies battling to eradicate child pornography on the Internet."

Bing's better

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, got off to a rocky start where porn filtering was concerned. It got rave reviews except for the way it allowed people to bypass its SafeSearch filter even after set to "strict filtering," which my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid wrote about at CNET. Microsoft quickly made two changes that pretty much solve the problem if parents have filtering software installed on the computers their kids use (or use Microsoft's or Apple's operating-system-level parental controls). Now you can just put the URL "explicit.bing.net" into the filter's list of sites to block, and the filter will block all sexually explicit images Bing searches might turn up. Sites already excluded from the filter, such as Playboy.com, will also not display in Bing.com, Larry explains. What won't work is what I suggested in my original post about Bing: simply turning on strict filtering and - if kids are compliant with a rule about not changing the strict setting - having peace of mind that nothing untoward will turn up without filtering software, as is true with other search engines. But to Microsoft's credit, it acted very quickly in response to concerns.

Social-media use in US schools: Study

Looking at the findings of social-media researchers, it's clear there's a growing gap between how kids consume information in school and the collaborative, media-rich way they gather and share information everywhere else. Given this, Lightspeed/NetTrekker sponsored some research to take a measure of where schools are with adoption of Web 2.0 tech such as online games, wikis, blogs, and virtual worlds (AKA virtual learning environments). The study found what we'd expect of user-driven media: In schools, too, adoption of these learning tools is from the ground up. Teachers are driving it, and their three top reasons are: to address students’ individual learning needs, engage students, and increase the accessibility of what they're teaching to their digital-native students. The study also found that, in 83% of school districts, very few or no teachers use online social networking for instruction; 40% of districts don't even allow use of social networking (I'm wondering why not Ning-style social sites that teachers create and control themselves?!); but almost half of districts have plans to allow teachers to share their content with Web 2.0 tools such as wikis (like using new-media tools to teach in old-media, top-down fashion, but it's a start). [The study's executive summary can be requested on this page.]

Filtering improved

The European Commission funded a just-completed three-year study of parental-control tools, and the results are now available. With the help of 140 testers (parents and teachers), the researchers studied 26 tools, from filtering to computer security, server- and family-computer-based. They looked at the tools' appropriateness for three age groups: 6-10, 11-14, and 15-16 (here are the testing criteria). On the accuracy of filtering technology, they report: "While we observed significant improvements in the filtering of pornographic content between 2006 and 2007, we stated last year that non-pornographic but harmful content needed more accurate filtering techniques. We can report significant improvements in this area too, and we observed individual improvements for three filters that participated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. In general, we observe a very positive trend in filter accuracy." Seven of the filtering products received a less-effective score this past year over 2007, however. "Our tests revealed that these filters do detect more potentially harmful content, but at the expense of unduly overblocking harmless content." Here, too, from the Safer Internet program are basic online-safety guidelines in 9 languages. Thanks to QuickLinks for pointing out this info.

BTW, in case you wonder how kids do find workarounds for filters at home, school, etc. (besides going to the library, friends' houses, etc.), here's just one example on the Web: "How to Get Around Blocked Web Sites at School or Work: A Newbie's Guide."

Oz filtering update

The protests are getting louder and their base is broadening, but so far the Australian government's nationwide filter plan is going forward. "Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government - mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism," Yahoo News reports. Dubbed by critics as "the "Great Aussie Firewall," the Internet service provider-based filtering "promises to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.... It would be "less severe than controls in Egypt and Iran, where bloggers have been imprisoned; in North Korea, where there is virtually no Internet access; or in China, which has a pervasive filtering system.... Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom have filters, but they are voluntary." The filtering is scheduled to be tested through next June and has yet to be approved by Parliament. One of the world's largest children's nonprofit organizations, Save the Children, questioned the allocation of funds earlier this month (see my item on this), but proponents question those who "believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online," Yahoo reports. Part of people's concern, reports indicate, is about using a technology that's both flawed and significantly slows down connection speeds. "A laboratory test of six filters for the Australian Communications Media Authority found they missed 3-12% of material they should have barred and wrongly blocked access to 1-8% of Web sites. The most accurate filters slowed browsing speeds up to 86%."

Oz child advocates oppose filtering

US educators frustrated with school filters will be interested in this news from Oz: "Support for the Government's plan to censor the Internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children's welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money," The Age reports. The plan - "to block 'illegal' content for all Australian internet users and 'inappropriate' adult content on an opt-in basis" - has also received "harsh opposition" from Australian consumers, online rights groups, the Greens, the Opposition, and the Internet industry. The Age cites the view of Holly Doel-Mackaway of Save the Children, "the largest independent children's rights agency in the world," that educating kids and parents is "the way to empower young people to be safe internet users." Filtering's flawed, she told the paper, because it doesn't get to the problem at its source and can't help but block useful online resources. "Live trials" of the filtering are scheduled to start by the holidays, The Age adds.

All Oz to have filtering

Soon all Australians' Internet access will be filtered, "under the government's $125.8 [about $85 million US] million Plan for Cyber-Safety," TechWorld Australia reports. The Australian government is requiring all Internet service providers to provide "a clean feed" to households, schools and public places with Internet access available to children. By this report, it appears some Australians thought they'd be able to "opt out" of the filtering, but reportedly not. There will be two levels filtering that blocks content inappropriate for children (not clear how that's defined) and filtering that only blocks illegal content, which presumably means child abuse images. ISPs told TechWorld that the blanket filtering "will cripple Internet speeds because the technology is not up to scratch." The government's about to run a field trial to iron out any kinks, according to TechWorld.

'Cloud filtering'

It does seem to give new meaning to the term "big brother." Zscaler cloud filtering is a filtering service for companies (maybe in future school networks, ISPs, whatever?) that intercepts all traffic coming in from or going out to the Web and "scrubs it" for content (and presumably communication) that violates company policy or is a security risk, the New York Times reports. What sounds more big-brother-ish than usual about it is that, first, it gives network managers "extremely granular controls over how their networks can be used. Detailed restrictions can be set over what kind of sites employees can visit and when they can visit them." For example, social networking could be blocked for one group of users and not another. Second, it monitors the "overall habits" of users on the network, so that subscribers can compare the habits on their networks to those of other corporate Zscaler subscribers.

National filtering for Oz may happen

It may still happen after all, I mean. After declaring the Howard government's effort to have the Internet filtered for households nationwide a failure, Australia's new Rudd government will persevere with the program. It's now in a test phase, Australian IT reports. "ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households. To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs." The filtering was the centerpiece of the Howard government's $189 million NetAlert program launched last August," the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier.

Oz to filter Web content nationwide

The Australian government is about to implement a nationwide Internet filtering program. New laws go into affect January 20 "imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones," the Herald Sun reports. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says adults won't be affected by the restrictions, which will require Internet service providers to access "free of pornography and other inappropriate material to houses and schools," content providers to check that young people of the correct age are accessing content designated for that age, and chatrooms to get "professionally assessed to determine whether [their] 'likely content' should be restricted," the Herald Sun and Agence France Presse report. Here's an opposing view from a US-based tech policy blog. Meanwhile, the porn filter the Australian government is pinning its nationwide filtering program to has been found by British researchers to be faulty, Australian IT reports. Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, "said the innovative blocking system CleanFeed, devised by British Internet service provider BT, could be circumvented in a number of ways." Later this week, Australian IT published an editorial saying the government's anti-porn plan needs revamping.

Oz plan to 'clean up the Web'

One piece of Prime Minister John Howard's plan to "clean up the Web" for Australian families is to provide free filtering software for them to install on household computers, Australian IT reports. That'll help families with young children who use the Web only on those computers, not those who access the Web on gameplayers, phones, or other portable devices. "Of the $189 million [US $155 million], $43 million will be provided immediately to double the size of the online child sex exploitation branch of the AFP [Australian Federal Police] and establish a working group to find ways of getting around privacy laws that protect sexual predators (Howard has pledged to "upgrade the search for chat-room sex predators and cut off terror sites"). He made his clean-up pledge "on a Webcast to more than 700 churches and thousands of churchgoers around the country." Here's the New York Times on a US cleanup effort, ObscenityCrimes.org, run by Morality in Media.

Online parenting tools: Long list + context

Marking National Internet Safety Month**, Adam Thierer - parent, author, and online-safety public policy specialist – commented in his blog: “This remains one of the great mysteries of the parental controls debate: Why is it that so many parents say they want more and better controls, but when they are made available many of them choose not to use them?”

Adams says some people think it’s because the parental controls aren’t easy enough to use and others because they’re too basic. I hope it’s because parents instinctively know tech tools are no blanket solution. Different tools (Web filters, phone filters, IM monitoring, Net curfew software, etc.) can be useful at different times, but nothing ever replaces parenting, even though we’re figuring it out as we go along!

Adam just released a book - Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: a Survey of Tools & Methods - that provides a very comprehensive survey of what’s out there for us, but saying in his introduction something very similar to what I just said: “If there is one point I try to get across in my book, it is that regardless of how robust they might be today, parental control tools and rating systems are no substitute for education - of both children and parents.”

Related links

Controls in the OS. Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg recently reviewed parental controls at the operating system level in both PCs and Macs. For PCs, he looks at the fairly comprehensive controls in Microsoft’s new OS, Vista. For more on Vista controls, see this item in my 1/12/07 issue .

PointSmartClickSafe: The cable industry has partnered with a number of national nonprofit organizations to offer PointSmartClickSafe.org, an online-safety-ed resource for parents and kids. Here’s the press release. Here’s Adam Thierer’s commentary on the project. The cable industry’s trade association, which spearheaded the project, is the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

**The statistics in the Senate's resolution on National Internet Safety Month, which haven't been widely corroborated in the online-safety research community, shouldn't be the focus of this document. For data, check out the research at the Digital Media & Learning Project, Pew Internet & American Life Project,and the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire - or search for "research" or "study" in the 10-year-old NetFamilyNews archive (search box at the top of each page).