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Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup this third week of July:


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Web News Briefs

  1. Net-related bills & the House: Gambling and spam

    The US House of Representatives was busy with Internet issues this week, defeating a bill banning Web gambling and approving anti-spam legislation. First the anti-gambling bill: Its margin was much narrower than the anti-spam vote: 245 votes for the ban and 159 against - 25 short of the 270 votes necessary, according to CNET. The bill's opponents made up an unusual coalition of libertarian legislators, pro-gambling Internet entrepreneurs (mostly in the sports betting and casino games categories), and conservative social groups. The online sale of state lottery tickets was also banned in the defeated bill. "Nearly 700 Internet sites offer online gambling, a business expected to grow from $1.1 billion in 1999 to $3 billion in 2002, according to a recent report for the online gambling industry," CNET reported. Also cited was a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey finding that 1 million Americans gamble online daily. Other coverage of this story can be found at Wired News and the New York Times.

    Anti-spam sentiments, on the other hand, apparently run quite deep. According to CNET, "the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act swept through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support: a 427-1 decision in the act's favor." It's the first time Congress has enacted anti-spam legislation, CNET adds. The bill, which still has to get a Senate vote, stops marketers from sending junk email unless it's identified as unsolicited advertising; it also supports the enforcement of "opt-out measures," so consumers can take their email addresses off of marketers' lists. Wired News has the story on the one legislator who did not vote for the anti-spam bill.

  2. Dot-com to dot-shop?

    Move over, dot-coms! That humongous category of Internet addresses - .com (for "commercial" top-level domains) - will soon be segmented into smaller groupings. The new sub-TLDs will look like ".shop," ".tel," and ".news," according to ABCNEWS.com. This first change in the addressing system in more than 10 years was approved in a meeting in Yokohama, Japan, this week - a meeting of the Internet's managing authority, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN will begin taking applications from companies, called registrars, that want to sell and register the new TLDs. The first registrar was the InterNIC, which was privatized and taken over by a company called Network Solutions. Later that company's monopoly was broken up, which is why there are now a number of registrars. ABCNEWS.com explains that, in this process, the registrars "will submit proposals for the new TLDs and explain how they will screen and register those seeking to own Web sites with the new suffixes. Applications will start in August, and by the end of the year the registrars and their new 'dot.somethings' will be chosen." Then the registrars will be able to sell domain names - with their new TLDs - to the public. Here's TheStandard.com's version of the story.

  3. Medicine & the Net: One child's story

    In "Parents Fight FDA to Save Son," Wired News tells the story of parents seeking alternative treatment for a young cancer patient. The conventional treatment, which their four-year-old son's doctor recommended and which is backed by the US Food and Drug Administration, included abysmal side effects, so they went on the Internet to find another way. Wired News does a great job of presenting multiple perspectives and the disadvantages (potential dangers even), as well as the advantages, of Net-based health-care research. This is a complicated story about, among other things, how the unprecedented access to information that the Internet has allowed is shaking up the way patients, doctors, corporations, and government have approached health care. Like the Napster story, it's also a piece of a much bigger story about the Internet's growing impact on just about every aspect of life, including the lives of those who don't yet use it.

  4. Email inundation

    Speaking of Napster, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) together received about 70,000 emails, mostly from Napster supporters, following last week's Senate hearings on the subject (see our report). The hearing was about whether Congress should intervene to control Napster, MP3.com, and the makers of other Net-based music-sharing programs to "protect" the music industry and musicians from copyright violations. According to Reuters via Wired News, "members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Hatch, said last week they were reluctant to enact any new legislation, noting that laws designed to protect intellectual property could stifle technological innovation."

    Meanwhile, as if to confirm the size and staying power of this story, USAToday reports that Napster.com was the third-fastest-growing Web site last month and the New York Times offers an alternative view (that of unknown musicians) on Napster. And the story gets yet bigger, as the tune-swapping controversy widens to include movie-swapping on the Net, reports the Times.

    On the user side of things, ZDNet's Jesse Burst boldly tells how to take full advantage of Napster, upgrading a PC (economically) for better listening. The article includes product recommendations.

  5. Net gender gap non-existent

    According to the latest figures the once nearly-all-male Internet definitely is no longer. "Peer pressure and attitude changes are bringing millions of American women online," reports the Associated Press (via USAToday). The article includes fresh data from Jupiter Communications (showing 61 million US women online now) and some interesting anecdotal material about Missouri teacher Marti McGee's "conversion" to research and shopping online. And observations from a University of Pennsylvania professor echo others in the media, linking women's growing appreciation of the Internet to the Net's increasing practicality.

    Meanwhile, Nielsen/NetRatings (via Nua Internet Surveys) goes even farther, saying that there are now more women than men online in the US.

  6. E-book experiment

    An author markets his book by giving it away free on the Web. True story. According to Wired News, Seth Godin, author of the bestseller "Permission Marketing," is making his 197-page new book, "Unleashing the Idea Virus" available now via his publisher's Web site (linked to from the Wired News article) and next week - still free, apparently - via Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, AOL and Peanut Press. The hardcover version, which will not be free, hits the market in September. If any of you actually download and read the entire online version, do email us about it (via feedback@netfamilynews.org). The most interesting part of this article is what Godin says about how writers will get paid in the future. For another take and some context, see New York Times Book Review columnist's take on what the Internet is doing to the publishing industry.

  7. Kids' privacy law: Lawyer's view

    Seems a little late in coming, since COPPA's launch was last April, but we found this lawyer's-eye-view of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act right on the mark. Attorney and writer Douglas M. Isenberg called the law "impractical and unworkable," a sign of how problematic legislation is. "As the laws stand today, children are welcome to view all the free porn they can find online, but they need to obtain their parents' consent before using some of the fun services offered by Disney, Nickelodeon, and other kid-oriented Web sites." (See the "experiment" Net Family News conducted at the time of COPPA's launch to test its effectiveness. We found that, right now, the law really only protects kids who choose to play and communicate safely and with privacy on the Net.) In a related story by the Associated Press (via USAToday), the FTC is beginning to enforce the law, emailing children's Web sites not in compliance with the message that they may face lawsuits.

  8. Air Fare Alert

    As many of us suspected, the airlines apparently are not offering their lowest possible fares on the Web. According to Reuters (via the New York Times), they've only promised to offer cheap last-minute fares over the phone, through their own phone reservation agents. The US Department of Transportation has been looking into it.

  9. Help with info overload?

    To John Markoff of the New York Times, one of the more intriguing software R&D projects going on at Microsoft these days is one aimed at shielding us from information overload while we're working. "The new software - which Microsoft hopes to use in commercial products within the year - would act as a combination secretary and traffic cop to hold back the torrents of electronic and voice mail, appointment requests and Internet information that increasingly threaten to overwhelm today's office workers.

  10. He got 'sniped' (on eBay)

    There's some Internet lingo for ya! The writer of a ZDNet article (via Yahoo! News) was the high bidder ($300) for three solid days on a radio being auctioned off at eBay.com, and just before the bidding closed a "sniper" came in at the last minute, bid $305, and snagged the radio. The writer cries, "Foul!" He also offers some solutions. Something to watch out for in online auctions.

  11. Tech-teaching toys

    For early insights into what's being targeted at little kids' holiday wish lists this year, check out this Wired News piece. The story focuses on Lego's MyBot for 4-6-year-olds, developed in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab. It looks to us like Lego's very sophisticated MindStorms "bundled toy" concept has been downsized for the littlest Lego consumers. For an early view on MindStorms & the Internet and our interview with Media Lab-connected Prof. Robbie Berg, please see our December '98 issue dedicated to Toyland and Cyberspace.

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2 + 2 Family Web resources

Notices of Web sites and tools for safe surfing and research have been piling up in our in-box. Here are the ones we think you might find useful. What we like most about the first three (the directory sites and the child's Net browser) is their simplicity. If you try any of them, do send comments. Whether you give a thumbs up or a thumbs down, your experience is valuable to fellow subscribers!

  1. 2 useful Web directories

    LibrarySpot.com has already earned a lot of recognition: e.g., it's one of Forbes's 33 best sites and among PC Magazine's Top 100. So this is just to make sure you're aware of this meaty Web reference library, which aims "make finding the best topical information on the Internet a quick, easy and enjoyable experience. It links to online libraries (government, law, medical, music, etc.), reference books (dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, quotations, calendars, associations), lists (spelling bee winners; prize winners; top 100 books, news stories, and languages), and even a page on how to cite Internet sources in research papers!

    As you can probably tell, "Just What I Asked For" was designed to be self-explanatory! Probably the two best one-word descriptions of it are "spare" and "safe." Unlike in Yahoo!, you won't find a link in this directory to any Web material you wouldn't want your children to see. In familiar categories - Arts & Culture, Education, Entertainment, Money, Parenting, Reference, Shopping, Travel, and others - there are links to "large and small sites, well-known and obscure," says the site's Webmaster. All sites are screened for kidsafe-ness. The goal, he says, is to make it "easier to find things without all the clutter." The JWIAF directory is also compliant with disability accessibility rules (if users click on a button that allows them to have all pages displayed in one window, without frames).

  2. 2 online-safety tools

    The "Internet Activity Center" is a little gem of a software product strictly for small surfers. This children's Web browser doesn't have a long list of sophisticated features (a four-year-old can disable it), as so many online-safety products do these days, but there's something quite refreshing about that. If…

    • You're smart and have the family's connected computer in the kitchen or some other high-traffic room,
    • You at least check in every now and then with your child's computer activity,
    • Your child's in the K-4th-grade age range,
    • And you're looking for a "filtering" product that's very easy to use…

    …this software's worth considering. With it, a child has access only to 1,000+ indexed Web sites for children. The product's publisher, Paul Jacobson, father of two, tells us the sites in this directory were all reviewed and chosen by "homeschooling moms in Grand Rapids, Mich.," so they're mostly educational. Categories in the directory include Math; Science; Spelling; Art, Music and Creativity; and Reference Works. We like to link you to further information about the resources we cite in the newsletter, but some search-engine research yielded only two places where the Activity Center is described. Warning: They're both e-commerce sites: eToys.com and Publishers Pipeline (the latter is a sponsor of ours).

    Family Guardian, out just six months, is in the crowded online-safety-tools category, where software products increasingly seem to have to differentiate themselves by adding more and more features. Family Guardian includes filtering, monitoring, and time-out features for all computer activity, not just when a child is connected to the Internet. Parents can check when a child's been online, where s/he's been, what applications have been used (besides an Internet browser), search the hard drive, and set up when s/he can be on the computer. As for filtering, the product's designer, Michael Lee, told us there are more than 20,000 blocked URLs (Web pages) in the database and there is keyword filtering as well. He says parents can add or delete both URLs and keywords. A caveat and a request: At the moment, we don't have the resources to test the products we tell you about, so - if you try Family Guardian - do let us know what you think.

* * * *

Update: Demise of an online-safety tool

We've just learned that ClickChoice, makers of the six-month-old myFilter software product (launched and made available for free last January), has been acquired - and the parent company will no longer support the product. Net Shepherd Inc., a Calgary-based technology company, acquired ClickChoice. Here is the Net Shepherd/ClickChoice Web page on the fate of myFilter.

* * * *

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

Sincerely,

Net Family News

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