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Parents, you do know that there's a lot of online chat associated with multiplayer gaming, right? (That is, gaming over the Net.) And, "as millions buy increasingly powerful cell phones, many companies are racing to develop video games to take advantage of the newfound portability," the Associated Press reports. What they mean by "portability" is that gamers can be anywhere. Which means that … [Read more...] about Games for phones: A downside?

The question arises ever more frequently: Do students ever step foot in libraries anymore? Yes, say some librarians, and the reason is, many libraries are even better than the Internet, students are beginning to find. And libraries are online too (this is not news to librarians!). According to the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript, a librarian at Williams College says forget the statistic (from the … [Read more...] about Libraries: Cooler than the Net

Here are two ways to go for musically minded families (customize away!): 1) Allow use of a service like Kazaa or BitTorrent to find and download legal music (decide whether to allow or disable file-sharing. Possible rules: Keep it legal; try to download only music; have an anti-spyware app installed and scan and delete spyware at least weekly; tell us if you happen to download anything strange. … [Read more...] about Possible P2P policies

If your child says s/he really wants to be able to share music with friends, and that's the whole reason for having Kazaa, BitTorrent, or Blubster on the family PC, there are wholly legal alternatives. One of the newest of these is Grouper, described in The Register. It allows you to share music, but just among a group of friends you sign up, and group members are streaming each other's music, … [Read more...] about Legal sharing

Kid file-sharing is problematic for parents, there's no doubt about it. Even if our kids have figured out how to avoid the viruses, spyware, and porn readily available on the P2P networks (see "File-sharing realities"), there's the ever-present issue of illegal music. Fortunately, Jon Pareles of the New York Times clears up the legal question for us: "Downloading music from the Internet is not … [Read more...] about Legal downloads