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I hope the need to report child pornography never arises at your house. But if anyone in your family uses a file-sharing service such as Grokster, Morpheus, Kazaa, or BiTTorrent, it could happen, because illegal child porn is traded on P2P networks. [See "Porn exceeds music in online file-sharing" in my 3/21/03 issue, referring to an '03 study of what people were searching for specifically on the … [Read more...] about Help in reporting child porn

Your comments and experiences can be valuable to other parents, so - with the writers' permission - I like to publish as many as possible. Five readers have emailed me recently about Neopets.com, parent-teacher e-conferences, and the Net in the lives of children. For their complete comments, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter. On email communications between parents and teachers, … [Read more...] about On parents’ minds

Does your kid podcast? If s/he's an aspiring DJ or standup comedian, s/he just might. Basically, podcasting is blogging, audio-style. "The idea behind a podcast is simple, yet brilliant," the Christian Science Monitor reports. On the listener end, it's the audio equivalent to TiVo. "Instead of using portable MP3 players such as the iPod only for listening to music, new software called iPodder … [Read more...] about From blogging to podcasting

Move over LiveJournal, Blogger, Xanga, etc. As of today, Microsoft hosts blogs and online journals too - at MSN Spaces. As at Google's Blogger and so many others, it's free (for those with free Hotmail or MSN Messenger accounts), the Associated Press reports. The Washington Post says that, "in our testing, MSN Spaces performed so-so at best. The photo publisher choked over a dial-up connection and … [Read more...] about Teens can blog at MSN too

In ethical discussions about music file-sharing (to borrow from Jack Black's line in the film School of Rock), kids will often explain their guilt-free file-sharing as a way of "sticking it to The Man" ("he" being the recording industry, which has sued thousands of file-sharers to date). Ethics aside for the moment, we've heard a lot from the recording industry so far, but very little from … [Read more...] about Musicians ok with P2P