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February 14, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

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


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For Valentines: 'Just called to say I love you'

For Valentines, imagine sending those Stevie Wonder words, along with his voice singing them, when you call someone on your cell phone. It can be done. "For $1.50 per message, Musicphone [a San Francisco startup] lets users create musical messages featuring song clips from artists like Richie, Stevie Wonder, Nelly, Eminem, Shaggy and Sheryl Crow," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Musicphone has licensing deals with Universal Music Group, the world's biggest record company, and music publishers BMI and ASCAP, and AT&T Wireless began offering the service to its MMode cell phone subscribers last month, the Chronicle adds. You'd think AT&T Wireless was in the romance business. It also struck a deal with Match.com to provide online matchmaking via cell phones, CNET reports.

On the Web, new dating sites appear to be popping up every day. It seems to be the one category not affected by the dot-com downturn, USAToday reports in a big-picture piece on the subject. "About 26 million people visited matchmaking sites in December - including nearly 8 million from work," according to the Washington Post. The Top 5 sites are Match.com, Yahoo Personals, One2OneMatch.com, Matchmaker.com, and AmericanSingles.com, the Post adds, but more general-interest sites like Salon.com and TheOnion.com are jumping into the game and adding dating sections.

"In a web-linked world, a $25 subscription fee provides instant access to tens of thousands of eligible singles - and the digital tools to sift candidates based on height, age, income, or a penchant for macramé. Love remains an art, but the rise of online personal ads is bringing a new level of science to the realm of romance," reports the Christian Science Monitor. Instead of "natural selection," it's being called "sexual selection," by at least one source in the Monitor article.

Not surprisingly, there's a downside to all this - especially in Japan, where the National Police Agency released a report saying that 813 criminal cases relating to dating sites were linked to child prostitution in 2002. Many of the victims had access the matchmaking sites via cell phones, The Inquirer reports from the UK (the Japan Times reported briefly on this too). The Wall Street Journal weighed in on this, focusing on how online dating affects marriages. We can't link you to the piece because the Journal requires a paid subscription, but Corante.com's summary zooms in on the key stats: "Hard data isn't easy to come by, but two-thirds of divorce lawyers in a survey by the 1,600-member Chicago-based American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers said the Internet played a significant role in their cases last year, up from essentially zero five years ago. Meeting a new love interest online; obsessive interest in pornography sites; and excessive time on the computer, are the top three Internet-related reasons for divorce, according to that survey. And a research firm found that half of all visitors to online dating sites are married."

Readers, if you notice one or more of the above dating sites (not to mention the more teen-appealing eCRUSH.com or Bolt.com) in use on your family PC, ask your kid(s) about it and share with other parents what you all learn from the discussion - via feedback@netfamilynews.org. We always appreciate hearing of your experiences!

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Web News Briefs

  1. Your kids can still be 'mousetrapped'

    John Zuccarini - known for the thousands of misspelled Web addresses (e.g., 15 variations on CartoonNetwork.com) he uses to trap people in online porn popup ads (the porn purveyors pay him for the number of ads viewed) - is still at it. The practice is called "mousetrapping" and "typosquatting." There has been some improvement since the US Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Zuccarini nearly a year ago (a US federal court ordered him to stop mousetrapping and to pay $1.9 million in fines), according to a just-released report from Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society: "Zuccarini's current 'mousetrapping' is somewhat less effective than his prior implementation, yielding fewer popup windows when a user attempts to close a Zuccarini site," but there are no other signs of compliance cited in the report. Though there are probably jurisdictional challenges (Zuccarini now operates out of the Bahamas), the report suggests that - for better results - the courts consider going after Web registrars (which sell Web addresses), not just individual Web publishers, and make it very easy for registrars to support court orders against mousetrappers. We called the FTC this week to see if they were considering a criminal case against Zuccarini (the last one was civil), and an attorney there told us they knew of the problem but could not comment further. Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing the Berkman Center report out.

  2. The fight against spam

    Spam now comprises almost a quarter of all email, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, citing a UK-based study. The figure comes from MessageLabs, an email security services provider in England, which said it had blocked more than 27 million messages qualifying as spam our of a total of 112.35 million emails. That, MessageLabs said, was a 13% increase over the previous month's figure. As for viruses, the virus-to-email ratio rose to 1 in 203, a 25% increase over December. The porn-to-non-porn ratio was 1 in 749 emails.

    "Parents panic when they discover that their teenagers have mail from 'Mellisa' at SexAffair.org: 'Hi there! I got your e-mail from Jennifer and I just wanted to tell you strait up, I really like - ! She told me u're into - too....' Does this mean the kids are checking out porn sites? (No, it does not)," the New York Times Magazine reports, only generally explaining why it doesn't necessarily mean kids are checking out porn sites (their email addresses have probably been "harvested" in bulk from discussion boards, chat rooms, newsgroups, etc., along with a lot of other peoples'). The piece covers how it all began, what techies are trying to do to combat the problem, how spam filters work (or fail to), what the FTC is up to, how the economics of spam vs. junk mail work, and why you don't want to "Click here to be removed" from a spammer's list - but doesn't pretend to claim there's much the average recipient can do about the problem. At least its complexities are clearer and, at the very end, the piece does propose "two simple measures [that] might be enough to stem the tide." Here's the view from a corporate sysop's desk was found in an eCommerceTimes.com piece this week.

  3. Online panhandling

    We saw a cute young panhandler interviewed on NBC's Today Show recently. Online panhandling, also known as "cyber-begging" has become a cottage industry, Wired News reports. At least it's a little less nefarious than camgirls and boys asking for money and gifts in exchange for pictures of themselves (see "Closer look at camgirls sites" in last week's issue). "The [panhandlers'] tales of woe vary. But the request is the same," reports Wired: send money by way of a home page often using online accounts such as at PayPal.com. Skeptics wonder - even if these people do raise much money - how long the phenomenon will last. Wired quotes some observers saying that those who are pulling in some money are actually good writers with attractive, well-designed Web sites. We put this item in the newsletter, then discovered it's quite a hot topic this week: Here are the Washington Post and the New York Times on e-panhandling. The Times cites the view of a University of Southern California trendwatcher, who says some donors admire the skills it takes to create a convincing panhandling Web site.

  4. A tool for the child porn battle

    The US is developing a national database of all known child pornography images similar to those already maintained by Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Interpol, the New York Times reports. "The national database, which began processing photos on Jan. 24, has two main goals: to help trace the children in the photos, and to aid in prosecution by establishing that the photos are of identified victims who were under 18 when the pictures were taken," according to the Times. The project is in response to the Supreme Court's ruling against the Child Pornography Prevention Act last April. "The court ruled that child pornography had to contain photos of actual children, not simply those that 'appear to be children'." Because most such databases track criminals and suspects rather than victims, care is being taken to protect the victims' privacy. The database reportedly will not contain their identities but rather "will list the law enforcement officers who can testify that the victims are real children."

  5. 'I was groomed online'

    Having a child "meet" a stranger online who lures him or her into an in-person meeting is the parent's nightmare of the Information Age. "To find out how real that danger is we asked a team of specialist investigators to pose as a 14-year-old child in an Internet chatroom," the BBC reports. The specialists posed as 14-year-old "Sydney" for two weeks. "She" was approached by 30 men "and even a middle-aged couple who apparently wanted a sexual encounter with someone they knew was a child." One of the men emailed "Sydney" every single day about leaving home and meeting him late at night. He was refused but "continued trying to develop the relationship, asking her probing questions about her sexual experience, fully aware she is a child of 14." He also told her how to erase her email archive and not to tell anyone about their "conversations." Next he wanted to "text" with her via cell phone. The investigators let him arrange a meeting after involving the police. "They took him into custody, searched his home and confiscated his computer hard drive. He was later released without charge. As the law stands [in the UK] there is little the police can do until someone commits an actual physical assault," the BBC reports. "The government has promised to introduce new legislation that will create a new offence of 'grooming' children for sex. Until then their only protection remains their parents' vigilance."

  6. Lots of personal Web site owners in US

    More than a fifth (21%) of Americans have their own personal Web sites or have a family member with his/her own site, according to BizReport, citing a recent University of Maryland survey. In addition, 13% of those surveyed said they own or a family member owns a domain name or web address for a hobby or personal interest. "The study determined that 77% of US adults connect to the Internet through a regular phone line, while 20% are making high-speed connections," BizReport reports. This was the same study that found that "US employees with Net access at both home and work spend an average of 5.9 hours per week at home online for work purposes and an average of 3.7 hours per week online at work for personal interests."

  7. A cell-phone techno-phobe

    Speaking of cell phones, a piece by Michelle Slatalla, crabby consumer (particularly concerning mobile communications) and techno-antagonist, in the New York Times this week is not to be missed. Her husband bought her a cell phone and suggested that, in order to get comfortable with it, she buy accessories, such as a hands-free kit for the car "that would send it a clear message that the two of us were a team." Well into that process, "I rebelled," our techno-phobe writes, "The whole shopping expedition made my head throb. Maybe a better solution would be to refuse to march in lockstep with the onerous demands of a materialistic consumer culture that was urging me to buy possessions for my possessions." We think you'll appreciate where she went for advice next.

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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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