toolbar
Search this site!
 


January 24, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this third 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

  1. Laptops: 'Big Macs and small fries'; TiVo freaks

    Now there are great laptops, big and small, for home or student use on both sides of the Mac/PC divide, writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid in a recent syndicated column. On the Mac side, this month "Apple Computer addressed the "big" vs. "little" PC issue by unveiling two new laptop machines" - the 17-inch PowerBook G4, with the largest screen of any notebook computer on the market but one inch thick and weighing in at 6.8 pounds, and the 12-inch PowerBook G4 (1.2 inches thick and 4.6 pounds). Apple's asking $3,299 and $1,799, respectively.

    As for the little G4, "it's not, as [Steve] Jobs claimed, the 'smallest full-featured notebook in the world'," Larry writes. "I'd have to give that honor to Fujitsu's 3.4 pound LifeBook P2000, which, like the new Mac portable, has a built-in DVD drive that can also read and write CDs. Also like the Mac, it comes with a wireless network connector. At $1,699 for the version with the DVD and the wireless network, it's actually a bit cheaper than the Mac. I've carried this Fujitsu notebook on several trips and I love it. I feel like a pack mule whenever I have to carry anything larger."

    Larry's written a couple of other useful home-PC pieces recently. Timely for late January, he tells how "PCs Offer Many Ways to Get Finances in Order" (he mentions Web sites and software programs for personal finance management, bill-paying, and record-keeping. And to keep the PC itself in good order, here's a list of helpful links.

  2. TiVo fans

    There are many of them, but Larry Magid, self-confessed TiVo addict that he is, has taken the time to compare three PVRs (personal video recorders) so families can weigh their own options. Besides TiVo, he looks at a ReplayTV 5000 from SonicBlue and a Scenium DRS7000N RCA - for pricing, features, and whether their companies are being sued. "ReplayTV, which is sort of the bad boy of the PVR industry, not only has a 30-second advance feature but it also has what the company calls 'Commercial Advance,' which automatically skips commercials on most recorded shows. It does this by actually figuring out when the commercial starts and ends, quickly jumping over it without your having to do anything.... Both the commercial skipping feature and the ability to e-mail programs have prompted major TV networks and movie studios to file a lawsuit against SonicBlue." (TiVo fans have figured out how to do 30-second forward hops, too, Larry writes - and they've posted the "hack" at the TiVo fan site, TiVoCommunity.com.)

    Meanwhile, ZDNet looks at what's ahead for home technology in general, from a business perspective, and folding PVRs into the mix.

* * * *

CyberTipline: Teen reports serious past mistake

Last summer an 18-year-old used the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to report that someone had posted pornographic photos of her at Yahoo.com.

When a Tipline analyst called her, the girl said that, when she was 15, she'd used a Web cam (digital camera attached to a computer monitor) to take pornographic pictures of herself. She told the National Center's analyst that she later accessed a "live camera chat room," where she was enticed into using the Web cam to show the pictures of herself in chat. "The suspect in this case had established an online friendship with the child," the National Center reports. "It was after the child befriended the suspect online that he posted the images of the child and also began emailing the pictures to the child's friends."

After the Center's analysts went to the Web site the girl cited and confirmed that the images appeared to be child pornography (they were still online last summer, several years later), it conducted email searches, and found a photograph and possible location for the suspect in the Philadelphia area. After the Philadelphia Police Department figured out exactly who and where the suspect was, it handed the case over to the area's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which this month got a warrant to search the suspect's home and seized the suspect's computers and a number of disks. The 30-year-old suspect has admitted to possessing child pornography and to posting it online. "The suspect has not officially been charged yet," the National Center said in its report, pending the results of forensic analysis of the computers and disks picked up at his house. [If anyone wants to report information to the CyberTipline, its toll-free phone number - 800-843-5678 - is just as responsive as its online reporting form.]

Readers, stories like these are chilling to teenagers as well as parents, and it's hard for most teens to imagine making such a mistake. But sometimes real-life situations like this are useful in family discussions about how the Internet can augment mistakes or bad judgment, making their effects last much longer than it usually takes to learn tough lessons.

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. US's anti-war rallies: The Net factor

    The estimates of how many peace activists turned out for rallies over Martin Luther King weekend conflict. But it's probably safe to say that the protests - at least those in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. - were the biggest since the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960s, Wired News reports. And so far, at least, war in Iraq hasn't happened - "a testimony to the organizing power of the Internet," Wired cites observers saying. "While the Vietnam-era anti-war movement took years to gather momentum, hundreds of thousands of protestors turned out in dozens of US cities on Saturday to protest a possible war in Iraq." Estimates for the turnouts in San Francisco and Washington ranged from 100,000 to 850,000 each, but even at the low end the numbers were significant, and protestors were young and old and representative of a huge variety of religious and political views. "The disparity of protestors is a sign the anti-war movement has gone mainstream, observers said, and it's thanks not to the media, but to hundreds of anti-war Web sites and mailing lists," Wired reported, citing and linking to a number of organizers' sites. One such, UnitedforPeace.org, "one of the anti-war movement's major clearinghouses," said the Internet helped make the weekend's effort an international one, with street demonstrations in 32 countries.

  2. The Net's role in pedophilia

    The number of child pornography users turned up in the international law-enforcement effort called Operation Ore (potentially some 250,000, based on the number of credit card numbers collected at the now-defunct porn site that led to the operation) is shocking. The 7,000 alleged users in the UK alone has raised questions - e.g., "Were there really so many paedophiles among us? How could so many trusted professionals such as police officers, judges, and doctors be implicated? and What drives the people who look at [those images]?" asks The Guardian. This week the UK paper published the view of Jim Bell, who was just released from prison for "secretly filming young girls and downloading indecent images of children from the Net." Like a recent article in Wired magazine, The Guardian piece offers a more granular and complicated - and probably more realistic - picture of Internet-based pedophilia than breaking news items about the latest batch of child-porn-user arrests. The writer provides some unexpected but credible reasons for why porn photo-collectors could represent a greater threat to society after convicted. He gives some context to the phenomenon of child models' Web sites, against which legislation has been proposed in the US Congress (see our coverage) and which have a lot in common with the kind of child porn published in US-based sites. The writer also suggests a downside to law enforcement operations like Ore, saying "Operation Ore will succeed in frightening people away from the credit card sites which offered the milder forms of child pornography. It will not affect the undercurrent of hardcore child porn, nor child prostitution, nor the appalling, frightening ways in which adults hurt children. It will replace informed understanding with mass hysteria, will claim some victims, and do little good. That is always the way with witch hunts."

    To editorialize a bit here... Whether or not such police operations are witch hunts now, they will be useful in the long run only if participants as well as the public consider their implications with informed, clear heads. Our thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this article out to us.

  3. Peer-to-peer porn

    Parents now have new reasons for concern about file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks: Porn purveyors see them as an important market of pro-active customers. In "Porn Strategy: Share and Snare," Wired News reports on how the software porn operators use on these networks and how they're marketing on them. For example, one such company's strategy is to "flood the file-share networks with the legitimate content on purpose in what is known as 'viral marketing'." Makes one wonder if the likes of Kazaa.com, MusicCity.com, and other communities allowing image- and video-swapping will become pornography cesspools.

  4. ISPs ordered to turn over online pirates

    In a closely watched case, a US federal judge ruled this week that Internet service providers have to reveal the identities of users suspected of illegally trading music files, the Washington Post reports. Verizon, the ISP in question, is appealing the decision, but - at least for now - it makes individual music file-swappers vulnerable to litigation - though it's unlikely the Recording Industry Association of America, the plaintiff in the case, would sue "hobbyists" or occasional file-sharers. In this case, the RIAA was going after a Verizon Online subscriber "extensively using the Kazaa file-sharing service," the Post wrote. Parents would want to be aware of any family members' hard drives that might be storing thousands of MP3 files. If a file-sharing application like Morpheus, Kazaa, or Grokster also resides on that hard drive and it's connected to the Internet, it could be a major "node" on a file-sharing network. The individuals behind those nodes are the people the RIAA wants to identify.

  5. Uncle Sam wants your comments

    At the address Regulations.gov, the US government this week unveiled a Web site that encourages public participation in policymaking. The site pulls together in one place all federal regulations open for public comment, according to the Washington Post. "Americans increasingly are using the Internet to participate in the federal regulatory process," the Post reports. "Mariners at sea and truckers on the road, for instance, have voiced their opinions on rules at the Department of Transportation, helping increase the number of public comments twenty-fold in three years." Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this item out.

  6. Top photo-swapping sites

    Some 13 million Americans visited photo-sharing Web sites this past November, Nua Internet Surveys reports. Yahoo! Photos, with 5.2 million site visitors was the most popular among home, work, and university photo-swappers, followed by MSN Photos (2 million unique visitors), Ofoto.com (1.3 million), and Picturetrail.com (1.2 million). Broadband users (those connecting with DSL and cable modem) accounted for 47% of all those photo-sharers.

  7. Tech of the future

    Bendable computers, electronic newspapers, houses built with nanotube sheets 1,000 times stronger than steel, and vital signs read remotely via sensors implanted in people's bodies: These are a few of the predictions made for the next 10 years by analysts at market research firm IDC. Wired News spoke with IDC's chief research officer John Gantz.

  8. Programmers against spam

    Some 500 programmers, researchers, hackers, and IT people recently met at MIT to tackle spam - junk email. InfoWorld reports that they weren't just looking to slow it down, they were out to "completely destroy its business model." It was thought to be the first-ever spam conference focused specifically on spam filters. Programmer William Yerazunis was testing MailFilter, a filter he designed in a special computer language, out on his colleagues. "At the conference at least, MailFilter was being seen as the great white hope for battling the escalating spam problem," InfoWorld said. "In tests Yerazunis performed, MailFilter was 99.915 percent accurate in identifying spam." Now these guys just have to get the big ISPs like AOL and MSN to adopt it.

  9. Privacy invasion in Russia

    Some 5 million customers of Russia's Mobile Telesystems were at risk of having their addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information stolen this week. The cell-phone company admitted to "a huge security breach that led to pirated CDs, purportedly containing its entire [customer] database ... appearing on the streets of Moscow, the New York Times reported. The Times added that people's personal data "often turns up in the hands of hawkers at the Mitinsky market in Moscow, where a vast array of recorded music, movies, computer software and other goods of dubious provenance can be bought for pennies."

* * * *

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.