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March 22, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this third week of March:


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Family Tech

  1. We can help fight child pornography, too

    This week's Family Tech Column for the San Jose Mercury News could not be more timely - given the international crackdown on Net-based child porn that was widely reported this week (see the lead item in Web News Briefs below). Writer Larry Magid of SafeKids.com explains how anybody can contribute to this concerted multi-country effort to combat what has become a serious problem on the Internet.

    One way to help is by reporting child pornography you run across to the CyberTipline.com (or call 1.800.843.5678) at the US's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Larry offers some numbers that indicate both the size of the problem and the success of the Tipline to date: "The CyberTipline has so far received more than 65,000 leads - all but about 4,000 having something to do with the Internet. The vast majority (56,000) were about child pornography."

    Larry's piece provides some important advice on what to do if you do run across child pornography (because it's illegal merely to possess or transmit such images). He also makes clear the distinction between illegal child pornography and legal adult pornography.

    Europe has child porn hotlines too, of course. Here's a page at the Web site of the Association of Internet Hotline Providers in Europe, with links to and information about and links to hotlines in 14 countries.

  2. Upgrading to a new PC

    Here's some handy advice for anyone getting a new computer at home: "A Port Beckons: Moving to a New PC," Larry's column in the New York Times. He lists the chores involved in getting set up, names some software products that can help, and explains how to use them.

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Subscribers write: Monitoring kids' IMs

In response to last week's feature on instant-messaging, "A mom's IM-monitoring story," we heard from two of you....

  1. From Maria in New Jersey - mother of "a very active online 12-year-old"

    "The fact that Betsy had to drug-test her daughter - which came back negative - after her daughter told her she did not use drugs tells all. There is no real dialogue here."

    We asked Maria if she'd be willing to expand on this a little, and she later emailed us:

    "I believe that it is a parent's duty to insure the safety of their child. If this progresses to the point where you have no other means but to monitor electronically, than yes I agree it must be done. However, I wonder what could have been done beforehand to open up communication and be able to work with the child in a mutual trust relationship.

    "My daughter and I converse every day on her goals and ideals, her friends and her online activities. I know her AOL password and I do go into her screenname to eliminate the pornographic spam that seems to get through her security level. I know she doesn't tell me everything, but by having daily meaningful conversations I feel that not only is she making informed choices as to her friends and activities but that I am also having an impact in what those choices are."

  2. From Treg in Ohio - father of another 12-year-old

    "I appreciate all that you do to protect families and especially children with your newsletter. Your current issue, I hope, brings attention to instant-messaging. I have a 12-year-old, and we monitor her emails closely. It's something that needs to be done on a continual basis.... She will let me know also if an email looks 'funny.' On two occasions she had email from a suspicious IM person. I answered the email as my daughter's dad, and we never heard from him/her again. It's a constant battle....

    "I have worked with children educating them on personal safety for over nine years and I have discovered that the learning process is not 'tell them once and they'll remember.' With any educational process, whether it be IM, child safety education, or math, children need to be informed, reinforced, and continually challenged to make the learning process work (tell them, tell them what you told them, tell them again)."

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New tool for kids to learn online safety

Since kids need "street smarts" for safe, enriching travel on the Infobahn, we like to point out new resources that come along for them....

"Staying Smart Online," produced by London-based Childnet International with Microsoft UK support, is designed to help 8-to-12-year-olds develop and test their online-safety sense. We like it because it's refreshingly straightforward: Kids can do this animated game/exercise in a matter of minutes.

And the take-away is memorable, an acronym: "SMART," for...


The SMART rules are already being used widely in the United Kingdom, said Childnet's Stephen Carrick-Davies. He told us that the piece was designed for the classroom as an introduction to online safety and ethics, but "could also be used by parents at home who need a help in introducing this important subject to children in a fun, interactive way." A 10-year-old we know seemed to agree. He ran through the piece after school one day this week, thinking through each point with a level of concentration that actually surprised us a little - especially the chat room section, since he'd never chatted online. He carefully read through the "quiz" at the end, then moved on to a new online game he wanted to check out.

What we learned is that a little play mixed in with information that's short and to the point works just fine for kids, maybe better than "infotainment," or educational games with information embedded in the play experience. Childnet's resource includes a section for parents and teachers on "How To Use 'Staying Smart Online' with Children."

* *

For kids who prefer to learn by hanging out, clicking around, playing games, etc., there's "Clicky's WebWorld" (ages 5-7) and "NetSmartz Kids" (8-12) at NetSmartz.org, a project of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The same basic messages of "SMART" are embedded in the 3-D, animated activities of the NetSmartz program. Most appealing are characters such as Sheriff Clicky and the Webville bad guys.

More for middle-schoolers, or "tweens," is "Jo Fool or Jo Cool: An Online Game About Savvy Surfing", by Canada's Media Awareness Network. The exercise "takes students through 12 mock Web scenarios to test their savvy surfing skills," e.g., chat, marketing sites, instant-messaging, music file-sharing, etc. It includes a very extensive "Teacher's Guide" that can be downloaded in pdf format.

For other such resources, "Berit's Best Sites for Children" has an Internet Safety page, listing and ranking Berit's picks for kids' online-safety training. Disney's "Surf Swell Island" got her top ranking (this page includes reviews by other grownups, too), if parents don't mind a little advertising mixed in with the learning experience. Here is the Disney resource itself.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Net child-porn ring cracked

    Among the 89 people charged this week in connection with a Net-based child pornography ring were a foster parent, a nurse, two Roman Catholic priests, and two police officers, according to the Washington Post's chilling lead. Those arrests were the result of a 14-month investigation across more than 20 states, and the US Justice Department said 50 more arrests were expected later in the week. The New York Times reports that there were also Little League baseball coaches, a school bus driver, and a day care provider among the suspects, adding that one committed suicide this week. More than 200 searches of homes and computers occurred and subpoenas were served upon Internet service providers, the FBI told the Times.

    As the week progressed, the story went global. "Twelve suspects were arrested in dawn raids Wednesday in a worldwide swoop on an 'elite' child pornography ring," Reuters reports (via CNET. Raids were carried out in the UK, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as in the US.

    Here's a book on this subject: "Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet," by Philip Jenkins, published last summer and reviewed at TechDirections.com.

  2. New filtering tool from the Net-ratings folk

    The new software, called "ICRAfilter, was developed by the London-based, nonprofit Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) and is free for the downloading at ICRA.org. After installing it, parents can "either opt for pre-set filters or set up their own, depending on how much freedom they want their children to have," reports the BBC.

    Besides the fact that it's free, what's unique about this filtering product is that it's based on ICRA's international Net ratings system. Web sites voluntarily rate themselves, using a standard, ICRA-provided questionnaire, based on the internationally recognized PICS technical standard. So far 50,000 sites (including ours) have rated themselves. That may be a drop in the bucket for the multi-million-site Web, but these are among the most popular sites on the Internet. "The world's top three sites Yahoo, MSN and AOL, which account for half all Internet traffic in the USA, are in the process of labelling," ICRA says in its press release this week. Parents can configure the software on their own PCs to add or delete specific Web sites.

    ICRA expands on what distinguishes this filter from any other: "its foundation in choice not censorship, in which it is supported by a consortium of leading Internet companies, associations and academics. The ICRA labelling system is purely descriptive of content and not a 'rating' based on moral judgment.... It is parents or other responsible adults who judge what is appropriate for their own children at the point of setting up the ICRAfilter." And we appreciate this other distinction: the way the software can embrace multiple cultures and grow with a child. It includes "context variables," as ICRA puts it - providing context sensitivity for content categories (sex, nudity, language, violence, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and weapons) "to distinguish sites that have educational, artistic or medical content. This adaptability allows the filter to grow with the child and work within different cultures."

  3. How IM users are being used

    We knew that strangers can intrude upon kids' instant-messaging sessions. We also knew that these intruders can trick IM users into downloading virus-carrying or home computer-invading software (not to mention files inappropriate for children). On top of that, there was the news this week - from the CERT Net-security center at Carnegie Mellon University - that "tens of thousands of systems have recently been compromised" by script kiddies (the techie term for people who write and plant invasive code on other people's computers). The hackers used ("compromised") the invaded computer systems to launch "denial of service" attacks against Web sites or networks they've targeted. In other words, they're using the instant-messaging and Internet relay chat software (IRC - many kids use IRC to download game software) to hijack individual users' PCs for a mass attack. All those hijacked PCs together flood the targeted Web server with requests so that the server crashes, which makes the Web site it's serving, or publishing, unavailable.

    The intruders hijack computers by sending IM and IRC users a message, inviting them to download some software. CERT says, "These messages typically offer the opportunity to download software of some value to the user, including improved music downloads, anti-virus protection, or pornography. Once the user downloads and executes the software, though, their system is co-opted by the attacker for use as an agent in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) network."

    The impact on the individual user's hijacked machine could be any/all of the following: the hacker can operate your computer by remote control, use or expose confidential data, install other malicious software, and change or delete files on your PC. Several news outlets reported this computer-security news from CERT, including InternetNews.com and TheRegister.com in the UK.

  4. Handhelds in the classroom

    Teachers who use them in their classrooms really like pocket, or handheld, computers - "despite their small size and more limited computing power," eSchoolNews reports, citing a recent study. The study - of the Palm Education Pioneer program's effectiveness, by independent research firm SRI International - found that 96% of the teachers surveyed said they believe handheld computers are an effective instructional tool, and 93% said yes to the statement: "having a classroom set of handheld devices will have a positive effect on my teaching practice." As for how handhelds compare to desktop computers, 73% agreed that they "are more easily used in the flow of classroom activity than desktop computers." ESchoolNews reports that what teachers like about handhelds is that they "promote student autonomy and responsibility," adding that "teachers also reported that the devices have created some new problems in the classroom, such as game playing,... and difficulties in synchronizing information and easily damaged screens."

  5. How the Net changes things

    Kevin Kelly's "Where Music Will Be Coming From" (in the New York Times Magazine) isn't just about music. It's about what the shift from analog to digital means for all media - music, writing, film, etc. In effect, Kevin says, it "liquifies" it, making it so easy to share, copy, edit, and transform that value shifts from the content itself to less tangible things like convenience and quality of delivery, access to/attention from artists, and customization. It's forcing musicians and record companies to think of new ways to make money, which particularly upsets the record companies, as we all know, given the long speech about piracy at the recent Grammy Awards ceremony. Kevin provides some interesting possibilities for the way the biz will change, such as sponsored bands (the way athletes are sponsored), real-time streaming of concerts (for a fee), custom-made CDs (optimizing audio for the size of a room or car). The BBC weighs in with the "music pirate's" perspective and, in "Discord Over Digital Music," that of the music industry, which accords the "global slump in music sales" to figures like the some 3 billion digital music files being swapped over the Net a month.

  6. A downside of file-swapping

    Morpheus, the file-sharing software that can be downloaded at MusicCity.com, is now tracking its users' Web-surfing activities, according to CNET. StreamCast Networks, the company behind Morpheus and Music City says it "has begun installing a Web browser add-on that sends some Morpheus users on an invisible Web detour aimed at capturing data about file swappers' surfing habits," CNET reports, explaining what that does: "When a file swapper visits a site such as Radioshack.com, eBay.com or a handful of others, their computer visits a separate site behind the scenes before loading the final destination site. Those separate servers, run by marketing companies ... how many times Morpheus users stop by." But StreamCast also says no personal information is being collected. The UK's Vnunet.com points out the irony here: that Morpheus has long claimed to be "a bastion of spyware-free code."

  7. Net gambling 'addiction'

    It's not that Web gambling is addictive per se, the BBC story seems to suggest. It's that Web-based gambling may be making it harder for gambling addicts to control their addiction. "It is thought that the Web may attract people who are trying to hide their gambling addiction," the BBC reports, citing recent research. In addition, the study - by psychologists George Ladd and Nancy Petry of the University of Connecticut Health Center - "warns that the explosive growth of the Internet will lead to more online betting opportunities - and thus increase the risk of more people suffering from the health and emotional difficulties associated with compulsive gambling. These can include substance abuse, circulatory disease, depression and risky sexual behaviours." Here's the Web site of the University of Connecticut Health Center.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News


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