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Dear Subscribers:

We have an invitation for you from a friend of ours in Washington who is putting together a panel of parents and kids to help the COPA Commission learn about how families use the Internet. If any parent-child team is interested in sharing their experience in Richmond, Va., late next month, please email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org. FYI, the COPA Commission is a congressionally appointed panel charged with identifying ways to help reduce children's exposure to harmful material on the Internet.

There was lots of child- and family-relevant Web news this third week of June. Here's our lineup:



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Out in public on the Net

For an online-safety video we reviewed last October, a mother was interviewed. Her teenage son, an avid Web chatroom user, had met a "sympathetic" friend while chatting online and had been lured by this person to meet him in person in a distant city (police later found the boy and brought him home virtually unharmed but very frightened). In the interview the mother said that, before the incident, she had thought that, as long as she knew her son was on the computer upstairs in his bedroom, he was safe.

That is a worst-case situation (the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children estimates that last year there were 785 cases in which an adult or child traveled to meet someone they first encountered online). The key lesson to be drawn from this real-life experience was the mother's realization that if there's a Net-connected computer in a child's life, there could also be other adults in his or her life about whom a parent knows nothing.

Another way to put it is, "When your children are online, they're out in public." That's from SafeKids.com's Larry Magid in his column this week in the San Jose Mercury News. Larry's column offers both perspective on cases like the one above and advice to parents on how to help a child avoid threatening situations. It's probably obvious by now that connected computers are best located in high-traffic areas of a home!

Last week, Larry's column shed light on the findings of the NCMEC's just-released study on child exploitation on the Net. Most notably, the vast majority - 96% - of those who sexually solicit teens online are not "dirty old men," but rather under 25 years of age; and 48% of those solicitors are under 18. Some 20% are female. The study and Larry's column also looked at how young people responded to the solicitations: Most of them "ended the solicitations, using a variety of strategies like logging off, leaving the site, or blocking the person."

Here, too, is the Today Show's coverage of the National Center's study. And on this page about the June 8-9, 2000, hearings of the COPA Commission, you can find NCMEC president Ernie Allen's testimony about the Center's survey.

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Great resources for teens

Last week the aunt of an online-precocious nine-year-old emailed us wondering if we knew of good online-safety resources specifically for teens (aren't most nine-year-olds teen wannabes?!). We sent her these URLs to some great Web pages in that category:

Send us your own favorites!.

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Web News Briefs

  1. 300 million and counting

    According to NUA Internet Surveys, there are now 304.36 million people online worldwide and 136.86 million in North America. Here's the rest of the breakdown: 2.58 million in Africa, 68.9 million in Asia/Pacific, 83.35 million in Europe, 1.90 million in the Middle East, and 10.74 million in South America.

  2. Privacy 'milestone'

    It was three years in the making, and its unveiling was the biggest Net news of the week. But the Platform for Privacy Preferences (nicknamed "P3P") - technology that allows Web publishers to give their visitors a sort of automatic privacy protection - is only a baby step. Wired News reports that, for P3P to be a big step forward, Web sites first have to have privacy policies that actually protect our privacy! Second, they have to decide to use P3P! As described by PC Magazine, P3P "lets Web sites deliver automated privacy statements that users can review and then decide how their information may be used." Here are TechWeb's and the New York Times's reports on P3P's debut.

    Consumer groups don't even think this is a baby step. According to ZDNet, they say it allows Web sites to collect more - not less - consumer information. For insights into what Internet companies have to consider, here's a ZDNet opinion piece suggesting why Internet companies need to "wake up" to the importance of protecting our privacy.

  3. COPA ruling

    Saying they sometimes have to make decisions they don't like, the three judges of a federal appeals court this week decided to keep the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) on hold. According to Reuters (via MSNBC), the court upheld US District Judge Lowell Reed's February 1999 injunction against the law, Congress's second attempt to limit children's exposure to pornography on the Internet. The first attempt was the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996 and struck down by the US Supreme Court in '97. So far the courts have found both the CDA and COPA to be unconstitutional. As for this week's ruling, the US Justice Department (which argued for the law) says it is "reviewing the decision." Where does the law goes from here? The Register looks at the Justice Department's options (possibly a full-blown trial back in the court that first put the law on hold or an appeal to the Supreme Court).

    If the government ultimately loses and COPA's main opponent - the American Civil Liberties - wins, the focus will have shifted from the publishing end to the user end of the child-online-protection equation. In other words, using the law to restrict publishing will have been found unconstitutional, so the focus would move to protecting children with parental guidance, technology (e.g., filtering or monitoring software), school rules, or a combination of solutions like these. For more on COPA, please see our editorial last November, when the federal appeals court heard arguments for and against the law.

  4. Instant messaging & AOL

    There are a lot of frustrated instant-messaging users out there. You know who you are!: America Online subscribers who can't "IM" with IM buddies who aren't on AOL, and vice versa. Well, all that's changing. According to TheStandard.com, to avoid talk of anti-competitive practices that has raised the eyebrows of antitrust regulators, AOL this week unveiled an IM-sharing plan. A CNET report says that means the 91 million screen names on AOL's IM network and the 62 million users on its ICQ service will be able to talk to users of Microsoft, Prodigy, iCast, Tribal Voice, and Odigo IM services. A ZDNet column says it's about time! But the New York Times reports it could be a year before users of competing services will actually get to message each other.

    Meanwhile, AltaVista must see the light at the end of the tunnel. It just launched a new IM service, InternetNews.com reports.

  5. E-signatures legit - almost

    They will allow consumers to buy cars, apply for loans, or close mortgages without signing a single piece of paper. After considerable debate and delay the US Congress has passed a bill to make digital signatures legally valid. Here's CNN.com on passage by the House of Representatives and ZDNet on the post-Senate part of the law's journey. TheStandard.com weighs in as well, saying the law will deal a serious blow to the ballpoint pen business. President Clinton has said he will sign the bill, which has been eagerly awaited by the high-tech industry.

  6. BAIR filtering service: Update

    Watch out for BAIR, suggests Wired News. The artificial intelligence-based filtering system by Exotrope is not working as well as the company and some reviewers had hoped (PC Magazine had given BAIR its Editor's Choice award). Wired reports that the part of BAIR that used standard key-word blocking technology worked all right, but in Wired's tests of the AI technology, "BAIR inexplicably blocked between 90 and 95 percent of the photographs with no regard for whether they were sexually explicit or not. Of the ones that were OK'd, about half were pornographic and half weren't." Exotrope says it's fixing the problem. Here's our report on BAIR in its early days (last February). If any of you have tried the service, tell us what you think.

  7. What users think

    Curious about what fellow users think of the Internet? The Markle Foundation is in the middle of a six-month study to look into just that. One thing they've discovered so far, according to the New York Times, is that users seem to trust business over the government to regulate the Net. That's a 180-degree shift from a similar study conducted two years ago. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, the United Nations, and "a theologian" were all suggested by older focus group participants when asked who should be involved in Internet governance, the Times reports. "College students, on the other hand, want the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service involved, since, as they see it, 'these people pretty much run who we are.' " Final results of the current study will be released in September.

  8. Net search: New-old trend

    Search and e-commerce sites are employing something new to help find what we're looking for: human beings, of all things! According to Wired News, at MSN.com, for example, "instead of typing in a search term and wading through page after page of possibly unhelpful returns, you just click on a button and a helpful expert calls you up and answers your question." The expert charges you between 5 cents and $5 a minute, depending on the question. Similar services include Abuzz.com, Askanexpert.com, ExpertCentral.com, KnowPost.com, and AskMe.com.

  9. Game violence: The next level?

    A new game, Soldier of Fortune, takes game violence to a whole new level, Wired News reports. The brief piece links to a new study that links violent games to aggressive behavior.

    And there's some new technology that adds a new dimension to multiplayer gaming as well. Wired News reports that players can now "share and swear." In other words, they can thrash each other in the game while they do so verbally with instant-messaging-type technology. All this courtesy of "Socket," which Wired says blends interactive gaming with IM and file-sharing like that of Napster (which allows music file sharing).

  10. Smart homes (and cars)

    For those among us who aren't quite ready to be the Jetsons, but are following trends in home networking, or "smart homes," we try to keep you up on the latest information. Here's some personal experience, personably written up by Jesse "Jetson" Berst at ZDNet.

    For those considering purchasing what might be called a rolling entertainment center, here's a New York Times piece on how movies and video games are replacing license-plate bingo on some family road trips this summer.

  11. Politics, politics

    There's a new option available for those interested in free Internet access. Free, but … you have to answer questions from the Democratic Party. Fairly personal ones, the Associated Press reports (via the New York Times). The Republicans were already offering Net access for $19.95 a month, merely requiring an e-mail address, billing information, and how the subscriber heard about the service. As for candidates representing other parties (many other), TheStandard.com cites a site devoted to "serious political entertainment" called DarkHorse2000.com, with "information on 235 contenders and pretenders for the White House."

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E-music: Napster the metaphor, new resources

Music online keeps bumping into the way we think about a lot of things: copyright law, ethics, and fairness, as well as mundane things like entertainment, convenience, and the costs thereof. A little startup called Napster.com has drawn disproportionate attention because its tune-sharing technology makes it supremely easy for people to get any kind of music they like - instantly, for free. And that, according to two new surveys this week, has become a way of life to people who use the Net to meet their music needs….

A lot of people: More than 10 million now use Napster (35 million in the US alone have downloaded music from the Net), and 1 billion music files now sit on Napster users' computers, according to a study by the Pew Internet Project.

Are they breaking copyright laws when they fluidly download a tune for free? The recording industry says so in its case against Napster - yet more than half of Napster users in one survey feel they're not guilty of violating copyright law when they download music using Napster software, according to Newsbytes.com.

The recording industry also says Napster use is eating into CD sales. But the other study cited in Newsbytes.com this week shows that 63% of the 3,300 University of Southern California students surveyed said they're buying the same number of CDs they bought before they started using Napster, and 10% said they actually buy more CDs now. The Newsbytes report suggests it's possible Napster's popularity just may put it beyond the reach of law as we know it. Napster's now much more than a technology or a company, whatever happens to either; it's a symbol of how the Internet is shaking up established behaviors and thinking in many aspects of life.

For anyone curious about why Napster's popularity has been a technical challenge for many colleges (an issue much in the news), TheStandard.com explains it well with a personal story - that of Bucknell University network administrator (and alum) Michael Weaver. Also very useful is the solution Michael found - Launch.com - because he didn't want to deprive students of one of their favorite entertainment sources.

Meanwhile, new music resources and technologies are popping up all the time….

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News

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