toolbar
Search this site!
 


January 17, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this second full week of January:


~~~~~~~~~~Support the Newsletter!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Help support Net Family News and take a free, 7-day trial of eLibrary -
100s of newspapers, magazines, reference books, maps, transcripts...
a real reference library online, completely child-safe. Try a search now:

eLibrary Logo

Or make a tax-deductible donation to our free public service, via...
Network for Good's online fundraising system for nonprofit organizations
or NetFamilyNews.org's page at Amazon.com's Honor System.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Family Tech: 'Profile' of a smart young Net surfer

When 9-year-old "Allie" goes online, to everybody out there in cyberspace she's 81-one-year-old retired military officer Demetri Kovalski from Poland. That's how her profile reads. She, not her mom or dad, was the one who came up with "Demetri."

"We all had the idea together to give me a fake name," Allie told us in a phone interview (for her protection, "Allie" isn't her real name either). "So I just typed in a name, a fake phone number, zip code, and age and everything."

And guess what. "I've gotten no message whatsoever except from people I know," Allie said. "So it really works. I've only gotten about 12 emails since I went online [last summer], and they're all from people I know." That's quite a statement, since at least 20% of online kids receive sexual solicitations over the Net (and only a quarter of them tell their parents), according to a 2000 report from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. More recently, police in Colorado Springs estimated that at least one child a day gets a sexual solicitation online in their city alone (see the first of the "Related links" below).

"She's been using a computer since she was about 3," Allie's mother, Bonnie, told us. "And we introduced her to the Internet at my workplace [she teaches law at the graduate level]. We decided not to get it at home for a while." Then last summer a 13-year-old cousin came to stay with the family for a while. She has "a little chat group with her friends in instant-messaging," Bonnie said. "She showed us how to join that list. So [Allie] IMs with her cousin, and I do too.... She'd taught herself how to type, and - just in the process of IM-ing with her cousin and now her [cousin's] mom, too - her typing has really improved."

We asked Bonnie what online-safety precautions their family has taken - besides restricting Allie's IM buddy list to relatives. "When we set up her account we talked about pop-up ads, inappropriate content, why kids are at risk on the Internet - meeting people online. I remembered reading an article a couple of years ago about some 10- or 11-year-old who was doing a book report on Little Women and put that phrase into a search engine and came up with all kinds of sexually explicit content."

"As long as she understands the logic behind something [such as Internet-use rules] - that there are good reasons and it's there to protect her, she follows it. She understands that for every privilege she gets, she has a responsibility too.... We've also moved the computer so that it's right off the kitchen and in our main footpath of observations," Bonnie added, "so that when she's on it, she knows she's not in a private space."

We asked Allie about her parents' rules, and she said there weren't very many. "They're not really, really strict. Basically, don't let your life shrivel away into the computer [she spends about 60-90 minutes a day on the computer, she told us]. Stay safe and don't go on sites that are inappropriate." Has she run into anything inappropriate? "Fortunately, no," she said. If she did, "I'd probably just shut off the computer or the Internet." Would you feel comfortable telling your mom? "Definitely...." What would she do? "She'd probably talk to me about it. I'm pretty sensitive, and if I see things that scare me they can get stuck in mind." So you kind of avoid those things? "Yeah... [and] it helps to be Demetri."

Not every kid will want to be a Demetri-type figure in his or her online profile, but - if she puts any information at all in her profile, and if she hasn't yet figured out the importance of protecting her privacy the way Allie has - help your child make sure her profile reveals nothing personal about her. Of course it's essential not to give out address, phone number, school name, etc., but it's equally important not to mention hobbies or concerns either, because information like that is what pedophiles use to "groom" their victims (gain their trust).

Fellow parents may be interested in a bit more wisdom we picked up from Bonnie. When we asked her how she felt about kids' privacy online, a family experience emerged that might be useful to parents of teenagers:

The cousin who came to stay with Allie's family last summer had, at the age of 13, been a victim of date rape. Bonnie told us the girl had gone online after the incident to find support because she felt too ashamed to talk with her parents. "It has opened my eyes to the pressures of adolescents at risk," Bonnie said. "Kids seek help online all the time.... A counselor told me how common this is." And this 13-year-old, like anyone seeking information online, got very mixed information," she said. Besides the dangers of sexual predators who go to peer-support locations on the Web looking for vulnerable kids, Bonnie made another point parents might appreciate: "In some ways, having all this information [and peer support] so readily available has allowed kids to keep from communicating with their parents even more."

Tell us about smart young Internet users you know! We'd love to hear their stories and tips, which can be useful to peers and parents everywhere. Just email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

* * *

Related links

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. E-rate fraught with fraud?

    The Center for Public Integrity in Washington has released a report saying that the e-rate, the $2.25 billion federal program that helps schools and libraries connect to the Net, is "honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans, but the government officials in charge say they don't have the resources to fix it." The report, based largely on investigations by the Federal Communications Commission, was released after the announcement of the first criminal case related to the e-rate, the New York Times reports. "Last month, federal prosecutors in New York accused an Internet service on Staten Island and three employees with conspiring to steal millions of dollars. Prosecutors said the defendants, who worked for Connect2 Internet Networks Inc., offered free service and equipment to many poor schools by lying, saying the schools had paid their share of the costs when they had not," according to the Times. Created in 1996, the e-rate program offers discounts of 20-90% for phone and Internet services and classroom wiring.

  2. 13-year-old victims

    A 13-year-old rape victim in Minnesota told police she first "met" her assailant in an AOL chat room, WCCO.com reports. We're seeing more and more stories like this one - not, we suspect, because the number of cases is growing so much as because local media are covering them more. One thing we've noticed in reports like this is that - in many of them - the victim is 13. This might suggest to parents that "tweens" and young teens are a particularly vulnerable age group online - they're beginning to explore and take risks but don't yet understand the implications of those risks. And the anonymity of the Internet adds to their false sense of security, as well as their ability to hide their risk-taking from parents and other caregivers. (Our thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this article out.)

  3. Music file-sharing update

    Within about six weeks, a US federal judge will probably do one of three things: dismiss a recording-industry case against Grokster, Morpheus, and Kazaa; shut down the file-sharing, or peer-to-peer, services (last week he ruled that the Australia-based providers of Kazaa could be sued by a US-based party); or send the case to a jury trial. Ironically, even if the judge orders StreamCast, for example, to shut its service down, StreamCast says it has no sure way of ending the service. "Unlike the ill-fated Napster service, Morpheus does not rely on a central server for a list of the files in its P-to-P network, making it harder to pull the plug on its users' activities," PC World reports. This goes for Grokster and Kazaa too - the software, having been downloaded by tens of millions, is already "out there" being used by Net users worldwide. The companies can't take their software back. (To give you a feel for the numbers, StreamCast claims 35 million users, Kazaa 176 million+ - there could be one or two at your house or school, which is why we're writing this.) See the PC World piece to find out the only semi-solution StreamCast's CEO can think of if the judge should order a shut-down.

    Meanwhile, Morpheus's latest upgrade (due out mid-year) explains how the software works. Right now a user's search for a particular song (MP3 file) really only searches a "cluster" of about 15,000 hard drives (of other people who've downloaded Morpheus). "While that's often enough machines to find a popular song ... more obscure files sometimes don't show up," PC World explains. The upgrade will allow users to "cluster-hop" - "to search further across the peer-to-peer network,... making it easier to locate obscure or rare recordings." PC World's piece describes other features the upgrade will have. To see what the file-sharing services look like, here are their Web sites: Kazaa.com, Morpheus.com, and Grokster.com.

  4. Online health scam: Silver 'remedies'

    This is important for parents to know about, since teens have been known to order steroids and other drugs online. Silver-based "remedies" went out of fashion long ago, about when antibiotics appeared on the health scene. But these concoctions, which can damage skin pigmentation (turning skin unhealthy-looking colors), have resurfaced online, Wired News reports. "Despite modern medicine and a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration that such remedies are ineffective, companies selling silver remedies [are] hawking their products as a cure-all for everything from cancer to herpes."

  5. Tracking kids and others

    Satellite, or GPS (Global Positioning System), tracking technology has gotten small enough to fit in child-size backpacks and even bracelets, the New York Times reports. Two providers of this technology cited by the Times are Wherify and Pomals Inc. "Wherify's Personal Locator is worn on the wrist and looks like a digital watch pumped up on steroids. Parents can give it to their children and then use the Wherify Web site to find out where they are," according to the Times. Pomals is working on a tracker that will be sewn into a backpack.

    All this is great for parents concerned about their kids' safety, but there's a downside: It can be used against people, too, to track their every movement as a serious invasion of privacy, even safety. The American Civil Liberties Union offers a strong argument on this side in its just-published study, "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society," covered by CNET. The ACLU "cites several trends that are leading to an advanced 'surveillance society'," CNET reports, "including video surveillance, the capturing and marketing of personally identifying data, new data-gathering technologies that take advantage of cell phones and other devices, and stepped-up government efforts to maintain databases containing information about citizens." In another report on this heavily covered topic, ZDNet paints a fairly extreme but useful picture of what it would be like to be on the receiving end of tracking tech. As for cell phones, back on the upside, manufacturers have begun putting tracking technology in their phones so that people reporting an emergency who don't know their location will automatically send a locating signal with their call. The question will always be, Who's on the monitoring end of these various applications - parents? government? corporate management?

  6. Computers 'n' girls: Latest look

    We've heard it many times: Girls use computers as a means to an end, as communication tools mostly; they're not particularly interested in either the machines themselves or in programming them. "Tech-minded teachers worry that programming is to this generation what math was to their mothers - a boys' club preventing girls from getting a foothold in the technological world," the New York Times reported this week. The Times suggests there's a debate on. One side says help make computers appealing to girls by exploiting those communications interests. The other side says maybe, just maybe those computer preferences exist "because no one has tried to expand girls' technological horizons"! In any case, something needs to be done, it appears. "More than 19,000 boys took the Advanced Placement [AP] computer science examination in 2001, compared with just over 2,400 girls," and one teacher in an all-girls school in Los Angeles told the Times he can't recruit the half-dozen students he needs to form an AP class in computer science!

  7. Would you go 'There'?

    It's not entirely unlike "The Sims Online" (see "Playing at life, online" in our 12/22 issue) because it's a "parallel world," but it's not a game. The Washington Post quotes There.com's CEO describing There.com as an "online get-away." You (or your avatar, rather) can go to a virtual store and buy virtual Nikes, "talk" with friends with words appearing in bubbles over your heads, race dune buggies, walk your dog, etc., etc. "Women are the key target audience," the Post reports, "because research shows women are more inclined to be sociable in cyberspace." Tell us what you think of simulating life or these virtual worlds!

  8. More on PC recycling

    Computer companies aren't doing enough to protect their workers and the environment from toxic materials or inform consumers about recycling old computers, the US is behind Europe and Japan in this area. "Six of the nine American companies that went under the microscope got failing grades, including Dell Computer and Gateway," reports ZDNet news, citing a study by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. The study was part of the coalition's Computer TakeBack Campaign. See last week's "Family Tech" feature on "e-leftovers" for information on PC recycling, and here are links from SafeKids.com's Larry Magid to information on how to clear all your data off a PC before recycling. Finally, here's coverage of the recycling-ed study from UK-based TheRegister.com.

  9. You@yourdomain.com

    It can be so time-consuming to have to change email addresses. So this week a writer at the New York Times thoughtfully walked readers through his own address-switching process - one that ended with the benefit of owning one's own, stable "domain." He suggests what to look for in a domain-name registrar and email service, explaining terms like "POP email accounts" and "storage space."

* * * *

Share with a Friend! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and colleagues? We would much appreciate your referral. To subscribe, they can just click here.

We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

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

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 

HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 2003 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy | Kindly supported by the UK Domain Name Registration.