Net Family Newsletter

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December 19, 2003
Dear Subscribers:
Hello, friends. Can't believe it, but this is our last issue of 2003. The next one will arrive in your in-box January 9 after our holiday break. In the meantime, we wish you all a peaceful, much-blessed holiday season.
Here's our lineup this week:

Family Tech: Staying in touch, with gamer kids and everybody else

Web News Briefs: Serious RIAA setback; Canada OKs MP3 downloading; Camera phones - top tech; Can spam law signed; Face-scanning in school; break or pop- ups; iTunes & Wal-Mart; U. of Maine's P2P message; UN summit wrap-up....

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Family Tech: Staying in touch...

On the cheap, over the Net, with anybody/everybody
There's no perfect solution for keeping in touch with long-distance friends and family, but there's now a very viable, cheaper way to do so over the Internet - and it's less flaky and geeky than Skype. (For our Skype mentions, see 10/17 and 11/21).
Of course, kids - especially avid file-sharers - won't view PC-to-PC communication as the least bit geeky (Skype, still in beta, is based on file- sharing technology). But we parents kind of like our telephones. We're not quite ready to throw them away, but we wouldn't mind making them more cost-efficient.
That's where Vonage comes in. In fact, "thanks to companies like Vonage, Internet telephony is finally ready for prime time," writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid.
The only real catch with Vonage is that it requires a broadband (DSL or cable modem) Internet connection. Beyond that, here are the pluses Larry cites: It...

Is easy to use with your existing phone(s), requiring virtually no change in calling habits.
Costs a flat $34.99/mo. for unlimited local or long-distance calls anywhere in North America (after a one-time activation fee of $29.99), or $24.99 for free local and regional calls and 500 long-distance minutes a month (additional minutes are 3.9 cents each).
Offers free voicemail, call-waiting, three-way calling, call-forwarding, and repeat dialing (if the other party's line is busy).
Has sound quality as good as or better than a regular phone line.

Larry, who lives in California and may soon be sending a kid to college on the East Coast, likes the feature that allows you to choose any area code you want for your Vonage service. "So if you had a student at school in Boston you could get a 617 area code from Palo Alto, and all calls from your student would be local." If you travel overseas a lot, you can take the Vonage phone adaptor with you and plug it into a hotel room jack (check with the hotel first!) "and use the service just as if you were home. That means free calls back to the United States from overseas." Families with members in multiple countries might want to think about signing up and shipping the adaptor to relatives overseas. If not in time for Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa - at least in time for Valentines! Larry's article details other pluses and tells how to get started.
For the bigger picture, Washington-based nonprofit research group New Millennium Research Council (NMRC) just released a report on Net phone, or VoIP (voice-over Internet protocol), technologies, calling for clear regulatory direction. "Consumers stand to benefit significantly from VoIP technologies, which could account for up to 40% of all US phone calls by 2009 - if clear regulatory directives are provided in the near future." NMRC adds that VoIP providers should however be exempted from the full weight of state and federal regulation to support its development in the consumer market. Here are the full report and the press release in pdf format.

With gamer kids
What better way to stay close to our gamer kids than by being gamer parents - or at least by consulting with said? GamerDad.com is a great little Web site - more like a blog, actually - by gamer dad and freelance writer Andrew Bub and a bunch of other 30-something gamer parents, including "MomGamer" columnist Colleen Hannon, all of whom sound like they'd be fun people to know (meet them all on the very readable "About Us" page). Andrew is a freelance game critic, who, when he became a parent, realized all those game magazines out there "talk" to gamers, not parents, it having not occurred to them that some gamers are parents who want the scoop on little gamers' games. Another great site like this, which we've mentioned in the past, is Games4Girls.com. [Thanks to "Neat New Stuff" for pointing GamerDad.com out.]

Via your own Web site
Whether you just want to put the latest family photos on a Web page or "you simply suspect that everyone who's anyone has a home page on the Internet," writes Larry in the New York Times, actually constructing those pages is no longer that big a deal - in terms of time or money.
As for time, learning html (hypertext markup language) never was rocket science, but in many cases html know-how isn't even necessary. Increasingly, Web-development software is like a word-processing program, but many Web hosting services provide tools that don't require any html at all. In terms of cost, "you may you may already be paying the price," Larry writes, because many Internet service providers offer free Web space, along with tools that make it easy to create your own home page. There are also plenty of services that will store your page for $5 a month (or free, if you don't mind having ads on your page)." He goes on to describe the Web site tools and services of AOL, EarthLink, Yahoo-owned Geocities, and other companies. We would add that creating a blog is usually even easier and feels just like having a Web site. Most blogging services are free but charge a little for "extras" like posting photos or having your own domain name (e.g., joesmith.com). Whichever way you go, the hardest part - Larry and I agree - is finding the time to keep the thing updated!

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Web News Briefs

Serious setback for the RIAA
The week's top story will probably result in a collective sigh of relief among parents who don't have a handle on their kids' use of file-sharing networks - though it certainly doesn't resolve any of the ethical issues. In a stunning turnaround for file-sharers and online-privacy advocates, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., today (Friday) dismissed the recording industry's subpoenas for file-sharer's identities, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported. The court said Verizon does not have to identify for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the file-sharers associated with IP (Internet protocol) addresses in its customer base. Verizon was ordered to do so last January by a US district court, according to Internet News, the decision on which hundreds of ensuing RIAA lawsuits against music file-sharers were based (since January the RIAA has issued 3,000 subpoena requests to ISPs and filed almost 400 copyright infringement actions). Today's decision did not address the legality of the lawsuits the RIAA has already filed, CNET reports, so stay tuned. Here's the full text of the appeals court's decision today.

Canada OKs MP3 downloading
Another big story this week was the decision by Canada's Copyright Board that it's lawful to download free music off the Internet but not lawful to upload, or share, it. Copyright holders will be compensated via a small tax (probably about $25) that will be added to MP3 players sold in Canada. "With this move, Canada becomes one of the few countries with codified consumer copying rights," reports the Dallas Morning News. "The result appears to be a win-win situation. Copyright holders and performers get a piece of the economic pie, and consumers are free to make copies for their personal use. But because of the peculiar wording of the copyright statutes, the copyright board may find itself forced to add a levy to yet another piece of equipment used to store music - the personal computer.
As for those who do share their music files, lawsuits may ensue. The Canadian Recording Industry Association said it would begin taking legal action against file-sharers early in 2004, Canada's National Post reports. Regardless of whether or not record companies can sue, parents, make sure you know what your family PC is sharing - for the sake of your family's privacy (for more on this, see "File-sharing detection software for parents," 11/14).

Top 2003 technology: Camera phones?!
Fortune magazine says they're actually not just about "slobs with atrocious table manners instantly sending those pictures to the slobs' best friends." Tens of millions of these cell phones with built-in cameras are already in use, and Fortune cites analysts as saying the figure will rise to hundreds of millions in the next five years. Which means Nokia will soon be the world's largest camera company and "the privacy and security issues [in school locker rooms, at public swimming pools, and at the beach, for example] raised by camera phones will be among the most vexing tech problems we'll face next year." Other concerning uses include "digital shoplifting" and "cellcerting," the BBC reports. "Digital shoplifting has become an increasingly tricky problem in Japan, where snaps of magazine fashion have been taken and sent to friends. And at music concerts, picture phones have replaced lighters held aloft and many users have used the mobiles to [send] images as well as sound recordings to friends instantaneously." On the upside, real estate agents are using picture phones to send potential buyers photos of property, emergency services use them to send images of injured people to hospitals before their arrival for better preparation, and hairdressers have been known to let clients to send photos of possible hairdos "to show their friends before going for the chop." The BBC adds that "there has also been a substantial growth in 'mobile blogs,' or 'moblogs,' which feature snaps of events as they happen.
Here's an article in Australia's BC News Online about growing privacy (and we would add child-safety) concerns about camera phones around the world, nicely summed up with this point: "The phones, with their discreet lens, tiny size and ability to immediately transmit images onto the Internet or other cell phones, are a voyeur's dream."

Can spam law signed
During the 15 minutes it took the White House to have the ceremony for President Bush's signing of the "CAN-SPAM Act," some 99.8 million pieces of spam arrived in people's in-boxes worldwide, the Washington Post reported. There appears to be wide consensus that the law might help but is no cure. The long- standing Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) says it's disappointed that the law is so weak, reports Larry Magid in a syndicated column (Larry's thorough piece mentions anti-spam technologies that, for consumers, will pick up where the law leaves off). According to the Post, "the bill's sponsors hope to deter spammers by criminalizing their most common techniques, such as faking the originating address of spam so the email cannot be traced and 'scraping' or combing Web pages for email addresses to add to mailing lists," according to the Post. The article adds that the law requires marketers to give recipients a clear opportunity to opt out of future mailings, directs the Federal Trade Commission to study the possibility of creating a national do-not-spam registry, and mandates that porn spam be labeled as such. Meanwhile, Microsoft and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced yesterday (Thursday) they're suing some of the most notorious alleged spammers in the country, the Seattle Times reports.
And who are the biggest spammers? A study unveiled this week by anti-spam software maker Clearswift found that pill pushers selling diet pills and Viagra were the leading category of spam. The category saw a growth spike last month, CNET reports: "Health" related topics represented 50% of all spam in November, up from 27% in October. Interestingly, pornography was in decline, representing 14% of all spam last month, with financial spam closely following at 12.5%. Porn spam is unlikely to disappear soon, though. "Clearswift has seen the rate of porn-oriented emails rise and fall from month to month as computer users and anti-spam software makers adjust their filters to catch new [spammers'] tricks ... and marketers think up new ways to work around security applications."

Face-scanning in school
A school in Phoenix, Arizona, has installed face-scanning technology to protect kids, the Associated Press reports. As part of a pilot project that "some law enforcement and education officials hope to expand," two cameras designed to recognize registered sex offenders and missing children will scan the faces of people who enter the office at Royal Palm Middle School. They're "linked to state and national databases of sex offenders, missing children, and alleged abductors." The American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to school officials and the local county sheriff asking them to reconsider the program, giving four reasons why they should. The technology reason is based on this very readable FAQ the ACLU has prepared on facial recognition tech - how it works, how effective it is (according to government studies), and how it's currently being used.

Annoying pop-ups get a break
Last week we reported that students were behind the annoying "Messenger" pop-ups - those gray dialog boxes that can appear on people's PC screens as often as every 10 minutes. Well, this week a federal judge basically said their little software company, D Squared, could continue sending the pop-up ads (which sell software to stop the pop-ups!), CNET reports. US District Judge Andre M. Davis refused to extend a preliminary injunction, filed by the Federal Trade Commission, against the company. "The decision means D Squared can resume sending ads through the [Windows Messenger] notification system [not to be confused with Instant Messenger], pending a trial on the matter scheduled for early next year."

iTunes is huge, but here comes Wal-Mart
Since it launched its Windows version in October, Apple's iTunes has nearly doubled its digital music sales, having sold a total of 25 million songs since last April. According to CNET, iTunes is now selling an average of 222,000 tunes a day, compared with 70,000/day when it was only accessible to Mac owners. But watch out, iTunes, Wal-Mart just launched its pay-per-tune music service, undercutting Apple's 99- cent pricing at 88 cents a tune, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
A separate report, by market researchers Ipsos-Insight, says the number of Americans willing to pay for music downloads doubled in the first half of this year. "Roughly 10 million Americans - or 16% - paid to download music or MP3 files off the Internet, while only 8% paid during the fourth quarter of 2002, CyberAtlas reports. As for who's making the switch, 18-to-24-year-olds "are the most likely to have paid to download digital music, while 12-to-17-year-olds were among the least likely."

U. of Maine's alternative message
While other universities are taking measures to limit file-sharing, the University of Maine is sending its students "a very different message," Wired News reports: it's better to share culture than to hoard it. "To prove that open sourcing any and all information can help students swim instead of sink, the University of Maine's Still Water new media lab has produced The Pool, a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts." It's an exercise in Internet-enable distributed creativity. Wired News links to similar "open culture" project at other universities, including the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons ("a student-run program centered on maintaining free and open standards for information") and the Stanford University-based Creative Commons ("building a body of creative works that are free for copying and reuse").

UN summit wrapup
The UN's first technology summit closed last week with "an agreement on lofty principles, but no commitments to practical measures," the BBC reports. It's a start because, according to some delegates the BBC spoke to, the Geneva summit "did succeed in alerting world leaders to the importance of new technology as a tool for development." It's about time the information revolution arrived on the global agenda for discussion! Summit co-host and Swiss President Pascal Couchepin noted that arrival. Certainly it was notable that more than 10,000 politicians, business representatives, development workers, and technology experts attended the summit. The International Herald Tribune reported that the UN agreed to "examine whether to introduce more international oversight of the Internet's semiformal administrative bodies." The article added that possibly the most significant development of the summit was what did not happen: "The industrialized powers had feared that developing nations would vote for the United Nations to take administrative control of the Internet and call for a new pool of money to help poorer countries go online - money that industrial nations presumably would be expected to provide. For a different, slightly sarcastic, but probably also fairly accurate view, there's The Register's coverage.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News