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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!

 

March 26, 2004

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this final full week of March:


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Kids might meet Net 'friends' on school sports trips: Det. Williams's Tip No. 7

"If a young athlete at your house travels to different cities or states for sports competitions, parents should be aware of potential risks. There have been cases reported regarding athletes meeting online 'friends' (predator) on these trips after telling them where their teams are staying.

"I first learned about this risk from reading a book entitled 'Katie.com: My Story,' by Katherine Tarbox (Plume, 2001). Miss Tarbox was 13 when she met 'Mark,' who told her in a chatroom that he was 23 years old. A nationally ranked swimmer, Katie lived in a town in Connecticut and traveled to Texas for a swim competition. 'Mark' turned out to be 41-year-old Frank, a pedophile with a criminal record. I applaud Tarbox for writing this book so parents and other teenagers can be informed.

"A similar incident was investigated by my department. A high school cheerleader living in a nearby state was surfing the Web for information to complete a school assignment about cheerleading. She came upon a distasteful photograph of herself at a cheerleading event on a Web site. She told her parents, who notified their local police. A check of the registered owner of that site indicated that he was residing in our jurisdiction. An investigation was conducted which showed that the Webmaster was a teacher/coach in a local school. The end result was that he had hundreds of photographs of teenage cheerleaders in his collection of child pornography.

"So as I complete the last safety tip of this series, I would like to reinforce my first tip: 'There is no substitution for parental supervision.' I also would like to thank editor Anne Collier for this opportunity to contribute this series of Child Internet Safety Tips for Parents. Stay safe on the Web!"

Det. Bob Williams is a father of two high school students and Youth Officer in the Greenwich, Conn., Police Department. This is the last tip of the series; see the complete series here.

Readers, we welcome your comments as well as your own families' tips and stories - parents and professionals like Bob are often each other's best experts on sound online-parenting. Email us anytime at feedback@netfamilynews.org! Here's a link at Amazon for more information on the book Katie.com.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Web 'red light district': Dot-xxx coming soon?

    A new .xxx domain - a virtual red light district, in effect - is in the works for the Web. It's one of 10 new top-level domains (TLDs) submitted to ICANN, the Internet's domain-name governing body, the Associated Press reports. Another one is .mobi for mobile-phone-based Web sites. "The new domains could be approved as early as this year and would be the first major additions since 2000." There will be a 30-day public comment period starting April 1, then the applications will be reviewed by "an independent panel," the AP continued. "Unlike today's most common domains, such as '.com,' Internet addresses based on the new suffixes would be available to people, organizations or businesses that comply with rules set by the sponsoring groups." Dot-xxx's sponsor is the Toronto-based International Foundation for Online Responsibility. Here is the application IFFOR and Jupiter, Fla.-based ICM Registry submitted to ICANN (including mission statement, stats, and background info), and here's the BBC's coverage.

    For parents: Dot-xxx is being billed by some of its advocates as another tool for protecting online kids from porn because it promotes responsible business practices by the adult content industry, including barring children from access (e.g., it reportedly will require porn companies to leave the dot-com space entirely). But the jury will be out on this for a while, we think, because of all the porn purveyors around the world who have less-than-legitimate business practices and are likely to stay in the dot-com domain. Another thing we noticed in reading IFFOR's application is that - though IFFOR's 8-point mission statement includes "respect for the right of parents to select the information accessed by their children" - the application also makes clear that "the .xxx TLD is intended primarily to serve the needs of the global responsible online adult-entertainment community" - not of children. To be fair, the application does say IFFOR "believes it can provide a framework for child-advocacy groups to engage in constructive dialogue with the Adult-Entertainment industry...."

    So lots of wait 'n' sees: whether .xxx will happen, what percentage of porn publishers would actually join, if it would reduce kids' exposure to sexual content, and what results constructive dialog between child advocates and the porn industry would yield.

  2. Reality check: Europe's parents on Net risks to kids

    Parents in Europe "are not really aware of the dangers their children may encounter when surfing the Net," reports a just-released study commissioned by the European Commission. The study, "Illegal and Harmful Content on the Internet," surveyed parents in the 15 EU member states, asking questions ranging from where and how children use the Net, what rules parents set concerning their Net use, and what parents know about reporting trouble encountered. Among the findings:

    • Kids' Net use is lowest in southern Europe. In Greece and Portugal, 15% and 31% of parents reported their kids use the Net. In northern Europe, the percentages were 64% in Denmark, the UK, and the Netherlands, 63% in Sweden, and 63% in Finland.
    • Children "children do not seem to benefit from the Internet at school in the same way across the EU." For example, 54% of Swedish kids use the Net in school, 11% in Italy and 8% in Greece do.
    • "Half of Europe's parents do not think their children know what to do if a situation on the Internet makes them uncomfortable," but confidence is higher in northern Europe.
    • "Parents impose [Internet use] rules differently according to the gender of their children." Girls are more likely to have rules imposed than boys on the use of mobile phones (23% girls, 19% boys) but boys more than girls on electronic games (26% boys, 16% girls) and computer use (20% boys, 16% girls).

  3. RIAA file-sharing lawsuits: New batch

    The RIAA's litigation machine keeps chugging along. With a renewed focus on university students, CNET reports, the recording industry trade association, trade association this week announced it was suing "532 anonymous individuals, including 89 people at 21 separate universities." It's the third round of lawsuits since the RIAA was told by the courts to file suits without subpoenaing ISPs for the file-sharers' identities. Here's Washington Post columnist Leslie Walker saying she's come to the conclusion that "no amount of suing by big-media kingpins can snuff out the creative flame sparked by the digital revolution." The Register published a copy of RIAA president Cary Sherman's letter to University of Northern Colorado about the five students it's suing at her university.

    Meanwhile, the RIAA's counterpart in the UK, British Phonographic Industry, announced this week it will start issuing legal warnings to Britain's most prolific music file-swappers, CNET reports.

  4. Kids teach parents piracy

    Nearly 40% of parents of online kids are unaware that file-sharing copyrighted material is illegal, 55% know their kids don't pay for the content, 15% aren't sure how it was acquired, and 33% who've downloaded music or films themselves learned how from their kids, Australian IT reports. It was reporting the findings of a Nielson study sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America. "The MPAA, which represents the major Hollywood studios and has joined the music labels in fighting piracy, said the survey shows parents still have a lot to learn," Australian IT added. Here's vnunet.com's coverage.

  5. Spam's eating into trust of email

    Because of spam, Internet users are finding email less reliable, less trustworthy, and more unpleasant than they did a year ago. That's according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life project, as cited by Reuters. Reuters quotes Brightmail as saying spam constituted 62% of all email last month. Here are some key findings from Pew:

    • 86% of email users reported some level of distress with spam.
    • Slightly more than half of Net users said they saw no change in the amount of spam they received at home or work.
    • 29% said they had reduced their use of email because of spam, up from 25% last June.
    • 63% said spam made them less trusting of email in general, up from 52%.
    • 77% said the spam flood made being online unpleasant and annoying, up from 70%.

    Articles on how to deal with spam keep coming out. This week the New York Times published "Stand and Fight: An Arsenal for Spam Victims."

  6. Conscientious spammer?

    Laura Betterly's spam company in Clearwater, Fla. employs 20 people, sends out around 8 million pieces of spam a day, and makes more than $1 million a year, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Yet, she's a fan of the Can-Spam Act, the Monitor adds. "She is all for cleaning up the industry by banning deceptive subject lines, requiring a real return address, and giving consumers a way to "opt out." She makes money on people responding to spam email (she's happy if 100 people out of, say, 8 million respond), so having rules like the Can-Spam law's helps people trust the email they get and respond more, which helps her business, the article indicates. (BTW, the Monitor also reports that Betterly's company doesn't even bother to send spam to Yahoo email accounts because Yahoo and "a few other ISPs filter too well."

  7. People lie less online?

    It wasn't scientific by any stretch, but a Cornell University professor conducted a little study with 30 of his undergraduate students and found that they "mishandled the truth in about 25% of face-to-face conversations, 37% of phone calls, 20% of instant-messaging chats, and "barely 14% off email messages," according to a New York Times essay. We all thought that anonymity makes it easier to fib, so how could this be? Well, writer Clive Thompson suggests it's because "we're worried about being busted. In 'real' life, after all, it's actually pretty easy to get away with spin. If you tell a lie to someone at a cocktail party or on the phone, you can always backtrack later and claim you said no such thing... On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you." Email records never go away. "We all read the headlines; we know that in cyberspace our words never die, because machines don't forget."

  8. Filtering for all of France's schools

    French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced recently that France plans to install Internet filtering in all state school nationwide "to deny pupils access to racist and anti-Semitic Web sites," Reuters reports. He made the announcement after a meeting about coordinating nationwide action against hate crimes and said the filtering system will be updated daily with input on anti- Semitic sites from CRIF, the umbrella group of Jewish organizations in France. At the same time the prime minister "warned against confusing 'the criminal authors of the barbarous attacks in Madrid and the French of Muslim faith'." (Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this item out.)

  9. Cyberstalking a crime in Washington

    Gov. Gary Locke of the state of Washington this week signed a bill that criminalizes cyberstalking, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. A cyberstalker is someone who "uses lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene language over the Internet or by email with the intent to harass, intimidate, torment, or embarrass someone or threatens to inflict injury on a person or property," according to the article. The new law makes this behavior a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison, a $5,000 fine, or both. "It becomes a felony if the perpetrator has a prior harassment conviction or makes a death threat." Thanks to BNA Internet Law for this heads-up.

  10. Virtual schools measuring up?

    In the past two years, the number of online public schools in the US has grown from 30 to 82 in 19 states, but "test results for 2003 show students at many cyber schools are not measuring up to state standards or to their peers who attend brick-and-mortar schools," Wired News reports. Students in Pennsylvania scored below the state average in most of the state's proficiency tests in 2003, and Ohio virtual-school students had similar problems. To be fair, though, data on some of the schools' at-risk student populations were less available than in brick-and-mortar schools.

  11. Senior surfers: Fast-growing group

    As the New York Times calls this demographic group, "the Net's late-bloomers" (people over 65) are the fastest-growing category of Internet users. The Times cites a Pew Internet and American Life Project study showing that their numbers have jumped 47% since 2000. However, "despite the increases, this age group still has a long way to go. Only 22% of Americans over 65 go online, the study shows, compared with 75% of those ages 30 to 49. But as Americans who are more comfortable with computers gradually reach the age of 65, the percentage going online (or more precisely, staying online) should soar."

  12. The art of game design

    Move over programmers, video game design is now becoming a career for artists too. The Washington Post points to the Arlington, Va.-based Art Institute of Washington, the University of Baltimore, the Corcoran College of Art & Design, and other schools as examples of schools offering courses and degree programs in animation, simulation, and digital entertainment. In fact, these programs are helping art schools attract students. "Annual computer and video-game software sales reached $7 billion in 2003," the Post reports, and "50% of Americans 6 and older play computer and video games."

  13. Spyware suspicion among senators

    It's a pretty sure sign that state lawmakers haven't gotten it right yet - legislation to fight spyware. "Members of a [US] Senate subcommittee can't define what spyware is, exactly, but they know they don't like it and want to ban it," Wired News reports, summarizing a Reuters piece. But federal-level legislation is in the works - one such bill being sponsored by Sen. Conrad Burns (R) of Montana. "A bill sponsored by committee members will need to define the problem precisely to avoid outlawing pop-up ads and other annoying but essentially harmless technologies," Wired News quotes consumer and business advocates as saying. And the Center for Democracy & Technology recommends some deep breathing and careful thinking to "define what we're after here." (See our 3/12 issue for an item on state-level anti-spyware efforts.)

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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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