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Welcome to the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and thanks to everyone who's just subscribed! Please invite friends and colleagues to sign up and help us to help grownups stay informed about children's safe, constructive use of the Internet. Email us anytime!

 

February 27, 2004

Dear Subscribers:

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


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Detective Williams's Tip No. 3 - 'What your child is doing at that computer may not always be homework!'

"This may sound kind of obvious," Bob writes, "but my experience as a police officer has shown that a lot of parents don't know this. There are plenty of distractions like instant-messaging, music-downloading, gear research, and invitations from friends to check out other sites on the Web that don't have much to do with homework.

"For example, in one case an 11-year-old boy placed an order for fireworks online (some classified as bombs by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) and had them delivered to the neighbors' house. The boy's grandfather appeared at my office with the box, seeking advice. He returned with his grandson for a talk, and the boy related that he went online, determined the cost of his order, went to the post office and got a money order and snail- mailed his order. The package was delivered to the house of an elderly neighbor, who kept it for the boy. He had told the neighbor that it was a "surprise birthday present" for his mother (she was later most definitely surprised). The neighbor got impatient and handed the package to the grandfather in the driveway.

"The boy told me that 'all his friends' were buying fireworks online, and one of them had told him to check out the fireworks Web site. Soon they were all networking and exchanging this information.

"I am sure parents have observed this with their own children. The child comes home from school with Web addresses written on the back of her hand or on little scraps of paper that end up in the dryer's lint filter. Online kids are no different from parents - we swap tips on good restaurants, discount sports equipment for kids, reliable babysitters, etc. Kids find and share Web sites of interest, and that's where a good child can end up in trouble. I find that children aren't equipped to analyze and solve problems they encounter online, whether they are being harassed by a peer or contacted by a child predator or they're providing personal information for a contest entry. But we can certainly help them learn this kind of critical thinking.

"One other suggestion I offer: Do not leave your child with the impression that, if something negative happens online and they are honest enough to tell you, you're going to pull the plug. Once a child senses that termination of use could happen, he may not tell you about his online experiences. Let's keep those lines of communication open!"

Det. Bob Williams is a father of two high school students and Youth Officer in the Greenwich, Conn., Police Department (you'll find other parts of this series here). Your reactions, family policies, and stories are always most welcome at feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Web News Briefs

  1. 'Compensated dating' in Japan

    A subset of "online dating" in Japan is child prostitution, and it's becoming a real problem. "Serious crimes, including murder, robbery, and rape, linked to online dating sites rose 37% in 2003 from the year before to 137 cases," according to Japan Today, citing National Police Agency figures.

    "Net-mom" Jean Armour Polly, who was in Japan last month, gives the social backdrop to the police stats in an article at Netmom.com (since placed in this site, with explanation at the top): "In Japan, as in many parts of the world, teen status is sought through the acquisition of brand name 'things'.... In the Shibuya and avant-garde Harajuku areas, Ground Zero for youth culture, hangers-on worship the 'trend du moment,' which currently includes lots of ripped clothing, expensive T-shirts, and body piercings. Wherever and whatever the latest buzz, teens discuss it all on the one 'must- have' accessory: their tiny Internet-enabled cell phones. Trouble is, neither the adornments nor the phone service come cheaply, and teen addiction to cell phone messaging and Net surfing adds up to huge monthly bills." To pay those bills (or help out Mom and Dad), Jean reports, they go to "online-dating" sites on those Web-connected phones and post messages like: "Send me mail if you can meet me Sunday for 30,000 yen (about $300.00)" and "Buy my virginity. I'm an innocent 15-year-old." Jean went to one of those sites to do a little fact-checking. Read her whole fascinating but scary piece to find out what happened. Remember, Web-connected phones will soon be everywhere (and US "camgirls" are already using the Web to solicit gifts in exchange for pictures of themselves - see "Camgirls," 2/7/03 - multimedia cell phones would not be a big leap for these young people).

  2. Global headway in anti-child porn police work

    Europol announced this week that police "cracked a number of worldwide networks offering child pornography," the BBC reports, in simultaneous raids in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit said the child porn being exchanged on these networks was "particularly serious." The networks were characterized as "a complex and organized hierarchical structure" pedophiles were using "to protect themselves, by hiding their identities and their atrocious activities." Here's Reuters on this development. (Our thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this news out.)

  3. How Google changed our lives

    Well, a lot of them - any Web searcher's, anyway. Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach equates "pregooglian" times with the Dark Ages. As long as three years ago "google" became a verb, and now people worldwide google "upwards of 200 million" times a day, according to the Post. "So phenomenal is its success that some industry watchers think an initial public offering of Google stock could raise $20 billion and trigger a second dot-com boom." But that's not what Achenbach means when he says Google has changed our world. For one thing, "library circulation dropped about 20% at major universities in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular. For most students, Google is where all research begins (and, for the frat boys, ends)." [For a fascinating look at how students at Wellesley College conduct their research), see our feature on critical thinking, 5/30/03.] Also different now is our access, with Google, to "group mind" - what Net users all over the world think is important (their top picks for most important Web pages come out on top in search results). The next step, for Google or its successor, now, is a search engine that knows you're an 8th-grade homework researcher or a university professor: search with an intelligent agent. Don't miss Joel's online discussion about the article will all kinds of Google users and critics.

    A definite downside of Google group mind was put forth this week in the Christian Science Monitor: journalists using its search results instead of statistical research to back up their theses. "Sad to say, plugging Google has become almost a telltale sign of sloppy reporting.... Readers should be wary of the numbers that writers cite from Google searches. Case in point: Google the aforementioned New Yorker writers, and you'll find that Nancy Franklin is more than twice as popular as Michael Specter, who scores only 1,750 hits versus her 3,770. Of course the data are misleading: Ms. Franklin shares her name with a porn star."

  4. Push-button PC backup

    Need more convenient back-up for all those digital family photos and kids' music files? There is now much more consumer-friendly help for all those overloaded family hard drives, the New York Times reports. It's in the form of one-touch external hard drives, such as the Western Digital Media Center and the OneTouch from Maxtor, and personal servers that back up all computers on a home network, e.g., the Mirra Personal Server.

  5. $5/month file-sharing solution?

    The idea - proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights organization, at a music law conference this week - is to have file-sharers pay a voluntary $5 monthly surcharge that would be collected by a central organization and distributed among those who own the rights to the songs. It's worked before, in radio, Wired News reports. "Broadcast radio stations paid a similar flat fee to ASCAP and BMI - organizations representing songwriters, composers and music publishers - to play their music as much as they wanted." Even the idea's biggest critic at the conference agreed it was a step in the right direction. Here's EFF's paper on "making P2P pay artists."

  6. 24-hour file-sharing protest

    It took place on "Grey Tuesday," so called because the 300+ Web sites and blogs participating were protesting record company EMI's efforts to stop them from offering downloadable copies of "The Grey Album," the New York Times reports. "'The Grey Album' is a critically praised collection of tracks created by Brian Burton, a Los Angeles D.J. who records as Danger Mouse. Mr. Burton created the album by layering Jay-Z's a cappella raps from 'The Black Album,' released on Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella label, over music he arranged using melodies and rhythms from the Beatles, commonly known as 'the White Album'," according to the Times. Burton didn't seek permission from EMI, which owns the publishing rights to the White Album. Both sides of this controversy are literally operating in a gray area, according to Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who said that technically Grey Tuesday protesters were breaking the law, but the law was written for "a certain form of industry," which has evolved. We wonder if the EFF's surcharge (just above) would satisfy the complaint in EMI's cease-and-desist letter. Here's EFF's "quick overview of the legal terrain" under
    Grey Tuesday.

  7. 'Game studies'

    Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. How about "professor of 20th-century American video games, editing The Annals of Computer Game Research," or holding the "Grand Theft Auto Endowed Chair at a prestigious university"? According to the New York Times, these titles are far from far-fetched. "Video-game studies is still a nascent field, too young to have a standard list of must-play games, let alone endowed professorships," the Times reports. However, young scholars cited in the article have noticed that "the first 30 years of video-game history have provided ample material for game critics ... but critics are uncertain about what to do with these riches." Agreed-upon vocabulary and criteria for evaluation are needed, and that's where academia comes in. On March 6 a video game conference will be held at Princeton University - "Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism" - "the first of its kind at an Ivy League university," according to the Times.

    Meanwhile, some women are trying to challenge "the stereotype that professional online gaming is the realm of geeky men alone," the BBC reports. For example, there's 26- year-old mom and aspiring journalist Anja Maller whose on-screen identity is Vildkatten, "the scourge of the online world of Counter-Strike ... the most popular online shoot-'em-up of all time," and 24-year-old Louise Thompson, known online (also in Counter-Strike) as Aurora. They are part of the Counter-Strike Danish clan, or team, DoMe, and - like other gaming teams - are always seeking corporate sponsorship to travel to tournaments. But it's harder for women gamers, they say.

    As for gamers who like TV.... Ever wonder what video-game characters do when they're off-duty, when they're not being manipulated by all those multi-player gamers out there? Well, gamers might be very intrigued to find out the answer to that question, and a new animated prime-time show called "Game Over" intends to provide it, the New York Times reports in "The Secret Life of Off-Duty Characters". It's a kind of animated soap opera, turns out, only maybe not quite as low-brow as The Simpsons.

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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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