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Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this first week of February:

Online safety news: 'Artificially intelligent' filtering; Surf Monkey's animated chat & new parental-consent system; HEYnetwork's private family communities; PBS Kids's relaunches

Web News Briefs: Health sites' privacy flaw; Surfing's risks; Ed-tech elite?; Clinton's digital-divide plan; China's Internet crackdown; Helping women in tech; Napster users vulnerable?

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Online safety: Friends old & new

We like to keep you posted on the latest in safety and privacy for kids in cyberspace. Here are recent developments and new resources worth noting. Do let us know what you find useful here - and why - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

• Exotrope: Adding AI to the mix

  In a nutshell, using artificial intelligence to filter Internet content is what sets Exotrope's "BAIR Filtering System" apart ("BAIR" for "Basic Artificial Intelligence Routine" - whew!). As you know, we've been following the development of "hybrid" filtering services. The two we've reported on so far - ClickChoice and BrowseSafe - blend human intelligence, client-based software (lives on the customer's computer), and server-based software (lives on the ISP's server). For Exotrope, swap out the human intelligence part and insert artificial intelligence.

  In theory, the service's potential for user convenience and for keeping up with Web growth is enormous, because artificial intelligence "reasons," "remembers," and "learns." For example, the software might detect an image with a high percentage of flesh tones in it. Once it "decides" that the image represents sexually explicit nudity and must therefore be blocked (the image actually is blocked until the software's made its decision), it "remembers" the percentages for the next time. It remembers lots of other things, too, like the number of bytes in the page and its address. The software also blocks text - it detects, blocks, and remembers words in context. The result: filtering "on the fly," as the company puts it - filtering that is applied to Web sites as users download them and that blocks only the images or text it deems objectionable. Whole Web pages aren't blocked unless everything on them is objectionable. Criteria for what is objectionable are not disclosed, unfortunately, but the company says it has no political or religious agenda and basically applies standards used by the US's public media.

  The only way people can get the BAIR filtering system right now is through an Internet service provider (as with BrowseSafe's service) and the system is new, so it's not yet widely available. When ISP customers type in a Web page's URL, the request goes through the ISP's server as well as through Exotrope's Cray supercomputer. Parts of BAIR's AI software reside on both. Also on that supercomputer are Exotrope's ever-growing "Block & Go" databases - lists of sites BAIR deems both objectionable and good. BAIR checks each requested site against those lists first, before it "thinks," so as to save Internet bandwidth and its own time and energy. ISPs can provide their customers with filtering maturity levels - child through adult. Among Exotrope's first ISPs are A1 Internet Services and Catholicwebs.com. BAIR currently filters in 14 languages now, 27 by the end of the year, Exotrope says, and they're working with ISPs in Europe, Australia, and China as well as in the US. The National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families recently added this filtering system to the list of tools it endorses (it doesn't yet appear on the solutions page of their Web site).

  Teachers, do you already know about another service of Exotrope's - EdNext? If not, you might find this growing, searchable database of 60,000+ educator-screened Web sites useful. The sites are ranked by grade level. There is a fee for using this system. If you use this resource, do email us what you think of it.

• The Monkey's news

  SurfMonkey.com has two new features, one for fun and one for safety. Safety first: With a new parental-consent system in place as of last weekend, Surf Monkey is among the first companies to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The law prohibits Web sites from collecting personal information from children under 13 without a parent's permission. The US Federal Trade Commission came up with the rules for compliance last October; Web sites must comply by April.

  How to obtain parental permission was the tricky part for Web sites, not to mention the FTC, in figuring out the compliance rules. Surf Monkey's solution is to give parents a choice of faxing, snail-mailing, or phoning their permission in. For that last option, Surf Monkey has a voicemail system by which parents can leave a message. The company keeps record of all those calls by storing the messages. Two people have been hired to monitor and manage the messages (e.g., to make sure they're not from high voices trying to sound low).

  Surf Monkey CEO David Smith told us they were a little nervous the new consent requirements would slow down registrations. "But for some reason," he said, "the number of registrations we got over the weekend was about 300% higher than before. We got more than 1,000 consent calls from parents. We can't pin it down to any one thing," he added. "We haven't done any significant advertising yet."

  The company also recently put its site through an online-safety audit and added a parental-controls feature to its site and tools. Called "CyberFriends," it's like an email buddy list, only it works for Surf Monkey's chat and bulletin board areas too. Parents choose who gets to be on their children's lists, so they exchange emails only with people on the pre-approved list. The same goes for private chat rooms and discussion boards. Kids have to be registered members (with that prior parental consent) to participate in the Monkey's public chat and bulletin boards.

  Surf Monkey's new fun feature is avatar-based chat. A child picks a character (avatar) she wants to assume, then goes into a 3-D chat room and chats. Words appear in a cartoon-like bubble above the avatar. She can also click on and animate objects in the room. David Smith said they plan to have six or seven rooms (each with its own décor) available soon.

  Already the company's noticed something fun about kids' behavior in chat rooms, David told us: "You're standing in a chat room, and a child will come right up to you [your avatar], give you a wave, say hi, and then say, 'Hey, let's chat.' They'll chat facing each other. They've quickly created their own protocol." It's already different from regular text chat, it seems - more like chatting with someone in person. Maybe 3-D chat has more politeness built in. It will be a fascinating thing to watch as the technology and people's use of it develop! Stay tuned: We'll be revisiting this topic in a future issue.

• HEYnetwork: Private family community

  On the HEYnetwork, a family can create a closed online community for itself. Though "public" features on the site - news, sports, weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, and e-commerce - are available to all users, the parent administrator controls what individual family members experience on the site. Children get their own user name and password so that, when they log on, they don't see ads in the HEY site, and their email comes only from parent-allowed parties. Like other children's communities on the Net (e.g., Surf Monkey, Headbone Zone and FreeZone), kids' communications at HEY are run through an automated profanity filter. As for e-commerce, each family has its own "electronic wallet" whereby the parent administrator manages children's e-commerce experience (it's a bit like ICanBuy.com's e-commerce solution for kids).

  Besides HEY's e-wallet and gift registry features, the concept of a private family area - with message boards, chat, and calendar - is not particularly new. It's also used at FamilyShoebox.com and other family-community services. But the HEYnetwork is multilingual, available now in English, French, and Spanish (it says more languages will be added this year), and there's an effort here to give parents more control over children's online experience. However, we don't believe this service replaces more far-reaching filtering products and server-based services.

• PBS Kids relaunches

  The Public Broadcasting Service has just relaunched PBSKids.org. Now kids can get a little closer to (if not quite interact with) Arthur, D.W., Barney, Po, and other favorite characters on PBS. Being able to email a favorite star isn't quite there yet. But as PBSKids puts it, kids can get "backstage" with the characters as they click around and find jokes, games, and writing and coloring activities. Parents will find more information about children's programming at local PBS stations and eventually local appearances by PBS show characters, birthday clubs, and other local activities. To us the most interesting new features are this move to get more local, an effort to make the site more navigable for pre-readers, and a "You Be the Judge" feature that encourages kids' critical thinking.

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Web News Briefs

1. Health sites' privacy flaw

   A study released this week found that some of the very personal information collected in the leading health-related Web sites is not being kept as private as the sites say it is. The study, by the nonprofit California HealthCare Foundation, examined the privacy practices of the 21 most popular health sites, according to USAToday. Among the study's findings was the fact that - though 19 of the 21 say they protect users' privacy - none of the 19 disclose all the information they gather from users. Fourteen of the health sites disclose online business partnerships, but six do nothing to require the partners (aka advertisers) to observe the same privacy rules the sites require of themselves. In some cases, this is unintentional, the New York Times indicates. We draw two lessons from this story: 1) Privacy-policy violations occur all across the Web - it's just that users' expectations (and need) for privacy are greater at health sites. 2) Many Web site operators aren't up to speed on the technical sophistication, especially where data-gathering's concerned, of Net advertising companies (such as DoubleClick) that place banner ads in their sites.

   [Meanwhile, CNET reports that a consumer advocacy group has organized a protest against DoubleClick. Here's the ZDNet article.]

   Then there's email, which Microsoft and the US Justice Department have illustrated for all of us is about as private as postcards. The New York Times has a piece about how much the email-security business has grown since Bill Gates had to answer questions in court about email messages he'd sent many moons before.

   From the What Will They Think of Next? Department…. On the flip side of all this, some Net users are actually getting paid to give up their privacy. According to the Associated Press, "pay-to-surf" companies such as All Advantage and ePipo pay users by the hour or the month to endure lots of advertising and to have their surfing patterns tracked.

2. Surfing security warning

   A high-level group of tech security experts issued a warning to all Internet users this week. According to the Associated Press, if we happen to stumble on some computer code hidden in "innocuous-looking links to popular Internet sites," two things might happen: "malicious programs" can be launched on a victim's computer or information a user types into a Web site form can be captured by people other than the site operators. These things can happen without the site operator's knowledge.

   The warning was jointly issued by the FBI, the US Defense Department, and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University. At the top of CERT's Advisories page, it says that the malicious code would be in "dynamically generated" Web pages, which means it's usually found in sites that are pretty technically sophisticated (e.g., portals and large commercial sites). To help users reduce the risk to their computers, CERT has posted a FAQ in its Web site. It explains how to disable scripting languages in both Netscape and Explorer, with this caveat: "Disabling scripting languages … provides the most protection but has the side effect for many users of disabling functionality that is important to them [some sites just don't work without scripts]. Users should select this option when they require the lowest possible level of risk."

   Here's some valuable perspective on home-PC vulnerability (for both dial-up and higher-speed connections) in the New York Times.

3. Ed-tech elite?

   "Technology doesn't transform education; people do," says eSchool News. The education-technology newspaper created its "Impact 30" awards to put those people in the spotlight. ESchool News has this year's (second-annual) top 30 "Best & Brightest in School Technology" in its January issue and its Web site. The choices for winners are based on reader polls and editors' judgment, eSchool News says. Some of the names will be quite familiar - Bill Gates, William Kennard, Michael Dell. At least there are some education professors in the Top 10! Meanwhile, in "T for Tech Ed in Texas", read about the work of a conscientious ed-tech specialist and prof who didn't make the list.

4. Clinton's digital-divide plan

   According to USAToday, President Clinton this week announced a plan that calls for $2 billion in tax incentives over 10 years and $380 million in federal grants. It's to encourage corporations and individuals to help low-income families get access to computers and the Internet by donating computers, sponsoring community technology centers, and training workers. The plan is in response to findings like those of the US Commerce Department that black and Hispanic households are only 40% as likely to have Net access as white families, and households with incomes of $75,000 and above in urban areas are more than 20 times as likely to have Net access as households at the lowest income levels. For its part, the Commerce Department announced last month that it would award $12.5 million in grants this year to help close the divide. Here's CNET's version of the story.

5. China's Internet crackdown

   The Internet is an anarchic "global grapevine" that makes governments - particularly China's - very nervous. And there's plenty of news that Beijing is taking tough measures to do something about it. Nua Internet Surveys reports that last week China's State Secrets Bureau "announced new rules banning anyone from revealing state secrets on bulletin boards, in chat rooms, or in newsgroups…. Web sites are not allowed to hire 'cyber reporters' … and all sites are subject to security checks and official approval." Sites that don't comply will be shut down, Nua added. Reports the News York Times, "Most troubling to some experts, Beijing has set a deadline of Monday for companies to register their commercial encryption software with the government." That means the government will be able to monitor companies' and sites' electronic communications. And just one more measure in a major crackdown was the shutting down of 127 Internet cafes in Shanghai, according to CNET.

6. Helping women in tech

   This story's for parents and teachers of girls interested in technology careers. There's more and more support, these days, for women entrepreneurs in this field. Wired News ran two stories this week about venture capital focused solely on women-owned tech companies. "Opening Doors for Women in Tech" is about "the first all-women venture capital forum" in Silicon Valley this week. It gave 25 women-owned companies a chance to pitch their business plans to corporate and venture-capital investors. Then there's the story about the woman-owned organization helping women-owned businesses, "A Woman's Venture in Philanthropy". The woman in question is Catherine Muther, who retired from a senior marketing job at Cisco Systems and founded (and funded) the Three Guineas Fund to help get capital in the hands of women. BTW, Wired News reports that, between 1987 and '99, the number of women-owned firms in the US increased by 103%.

7. Napster users vulnerable?

   Because music is a language teens (and many adults!) use as much as speech, we think it's important to keep you up on e-music news. Here's an alert for the Napster users in your house or classroom: An Internet security expert says people who use Napster to trade digital music files may not be as anonymous as they they think they are. CNET reports that Napster's software exposes users' Internet protocol (IP) addresses, the strings of numbers that identify people's computers on the Internet. "That could help copyright owners [aka record companies] identify and try to prosecute Napster users who may be illegally swapping music." In these litigious early days of Net-based music, unsuspecting users are suddenly learning more than they ever wanted to know about copyright law!

   Meanwhile, the US-based recording industry is not alone in wanting to stamp out Net music piracy. It's joined by the heavy-handed British company, Copyright Control Services, according to Wired News. By working with Internet service providers, CCS says, it has shut down 5,000 piracy-practicing Web sites so far, preempting any need for lawsuits. Wired's thorough piece is really about what the best anti-piracy strategy really is - litigation or other measures.

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