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August 30, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this final week of August:


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Family Tech

  1. Accessible parents

    In "How to Make Yourself Reachable in 5 Places at Once" at the New York Times, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid suggests that maximum accessibility to your kids may mean more than getting them a cell phone. It might help to add a personal toll-free number or "creative call-forwarding" to the mix. His column explains what these mean and how to get them.

    Another piece in the New York Times looks at whether households dare cut the cord - lose the land line(s) - and go all cellular, all the time. "A small but growing number of consumers, many of them students or recent college graduates, have abandoned land-line telephones altogether in favor of wireless service," the Times reports, adding that "nearly 3% of telephone users have made wireless phones their primary telephone." (Before you even consider it, it might be good to see if there's a mobile phone service in your area which offers unlimited local calls.)

  2. Family photo-editing

    If you want to do more with digital photos than crop them, you certainly don't have to spend $600+ for Adobe Photoshop. In his syndicated column, Larry writes about two very good medium-priced programs - Photoshop Elements by Adobe and Picture It! by Microsoft - that allow novices to do pretty serious photo-editing. Of the latter product he writes, "My favorite features - especially for the older set - are the face touch-up tools, including one designed specifically to remove wrinkles. It works, and it's cheaper and safer than plastic surgery."

  3. Family computer maintenance

    Per capita computer literacy *has* to be a lot higher among teenagers than parents, we all probably agree. But some households do not contain teen tech wizards, which leaves parents in charge of family tech support. According to the New York Times, "survey data collected by [Pew Internet & American Life research last year] shed light on one reason parents are shouldering more of the tech-support burden: they are not as clueless as they used to be. At least about computers." In a fun article, the Times describes how a new sort of division of labor has developed in one household: parents do any computer-related task that might feel like labor; kids do the more exploratory stuff. The example given is Dad setting up the new printer, child figuring out advanced printer functions. Increasingly, tech support falls to Mom or Dad. But we really should delegate some of it! So here is a very useful list of family computer-maintenance chores that can be printed out and tacked on the wall or computer monitor for kids' frequent reference.

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Focus: Net's underbelly

It's something most anyone who's been online knows or should know: Use of the Internet really requires street smarts. As a tool for publishing and communications as well as consumption - the cheapest, most convenient one humanity has created yet - it puts just about everything human beings are up to, from high-minded to horrific, at the fingertips of anyone, anywhere connected to it. It's an enabler of artists, academics, honest businesspeople, and police, as well as scammers, thieves, porn purveyors, and pedophiles. Both Business Week and the New York Times take an in-depth look at the dark side of the Net this week.

"To be sure, the better neighborhoods of the Net - where one can find learned discussion of Kierkegaard or analysis of Gram Parsons's influence on rock music - are flourishing," the Times reports. "But critics ... argue that those leafy digital neighborhoods are increasingly surrounded by wildly expanding zones of slums, bad taste and risk." Others say the Net has become so diverse that it has become impossible to characterize (the Times paraphrased one source as saying "he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn"). Some people are trying "to dilute the bad by raising the concentration of the good" through initiatives like Project Gutenberg and the Million Books Project (both putting good literature online) and the Digital Promise Project (an initiative to create an educational trust fund designed to "do for education what NIH does for health, NSF does for science, and DARPA does for national defense," says the site's "About" page).

As for Business Week, five of its reporters "spent four months visiting the seedy side of the Internet. We sat beside gamblers as they placed bets on illegal gaming sites, interviewed people who bought drugs online, and talked with those who have lost loved ones because of cybercrimes." They found that "the Underground Web is bigger, broader, scarier, and more damaging than most people realize" and proceed to explain why, zooming in on gambling, drugs, child porn, and money scams. One of the biggest enablers of perpetrators in all these categories, Business Week concluded, is the jurisdiction problem, or "balkanization," as the writers call it: "Too many cops are stuck in a game of jurisdictional roulette." Their conclusion is not hopeful. "Cleaning up the Net will take vigilance and a slew of legal and public actions. For now, though, the Web has too many dark and dangerous corners and too little law and order."

Relating all this to small Net users, we're back to street smarts - of the online sort. The two articles are doing children a service by alerting their caregivers to the need for Internet-educated, engaged parenting and teaching. Both the New York Times piece, with its thoughtful balance, and the Business Week one, with its thorough digging, reinforce the conclusions of a two-year US National Research Council study, "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" announced last May (see our coverage). The study's authors wrote that "no single approach - technical, legal, economic, or educational - will be sufficient to protect children from online pornography," sexual predators, snake-oil salespeople, or identity thieves. "An essential element of protecting children from inappropriate material on the Internet - and one largely ignored in the present debate - is the promotion of social and educational strategies that teach children to make wise choices about using the Internet and to take control of their online experiences: where they go, what they see, to whom they talk, and what they do."

We always appreciate your feedback. Do email us your reactions and experiences with online kids anytime, via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Peak season for term-paper sales

    Besides online casinos and porn, Web sites that sell school term papers reportedly represent one of the few online businesses that have weathered the dot-com bust very well. That's what the publisher of Tel Aviv-based SchoolSucks.com, which sells a lot of term-paper-purveyor ads, told Wired News . Then there are paper-selling sites themselves, which thrive on subscription fees. Wired links to one of these as well as the Center for Academic Integrity and a site that provides a popular "plagiarism prevention system," offering various subscription plans based on academic levels.

  2. Child-related sex crimes on rise in Japan

    The popularity of Net-connected mobile phones and Internet dating sites are linked to a "huge rise in sex crimes involving minors" in Japan, according to a report from that country's National Police Agency. "In the first six months of this year, 793 crimes were reported in which victims were contacted through online dating sites, compared with 888 for all of last year," reports Reuters, citing the NPA announcement. In its coverage, the BBC reports that more than 70% of this year's cases involved sex with teenage girls, and "Internet-enabled mobile phones were reportedly used to access the dating sites in almost all cases." The BBC adds that that latest figures available (last February) show that Japan has more than 550 Net-based dating services. In 1999 Japan outlawed paying for sex with minors and sales or distribution of child pornography, "but teen prostitution remains widespread," the BBC adds.

  3. Tough distance-learning lessons

    "In many cases, the virtual classroom has earned a failing grade," reports the Washington Post , saying that well known universities such as Columbia, Temple, and New York have scaled back or scrapped plans to spin off online versions of themselves. The Post also cites EduVentures research showing that "US companies developing e-learning tools have fallen off a cliff, from nearly half a billion dollars two years ago to just $20 million today." On the other hand, there are plenty of students out there earning degrees in online academic programs, Wired News reports. Wired says "the number of accredited colleges that offer 100% online degrees without hidden residency requirements has jumped from 12 last year to more than 30 in 2002." Check out Wired News's meaty Back to School section for dozens of articles on many aspects of school and technology.

  4. Net-distributed music composing

    Anyone with a musician or digital-music fan in their family or classroom would be interested in a story about how "uninvited" bassists, drummers, etc., "participate" in online music recording and publishing. Your musician would be able to explain better than we can how the Internet helps musicians turn already-recorded music into the stuff of a live jazz concert. But here's a helpful example: After describing a scenario in which an experienced bass player takes a guitar-and-drum-only album, adds a recording of his bass playing to it, and puts the result in his Web site, the New York Times reports that, "in many ways, this online-only album lives up to the dream that music fans originally had for the Internet. It is an example not just of a musician delivering work directly to his fans, but also of performers bending the rules for the sake of art." The "uninvited bass player" not only puts his music experiment online, he puts progressive clips of it in the site, so listeners can hear the results of what he's learning as he learns - e.g., as he figures out how not to "detract from the original appeal and integrity of the music." [In many ways, this story illustrates the opposite of the gutter Net in our Focus piece up there.]

    Meanwhile, the recording industry remains on the warpath against music file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America this week announced that CD sales were down 7% in the first six months of this year, MSNBC reports, quoting the RIAA as claiming that the "No. 1 cause" is digital piracy. Parents should note that individual file-sharers - not just file-swapping services like Morpheus or Kazaa - can now be targets of record industry litigation (see "Record companies to sue Individuals?" in our 7/5/02 issue).

    From the opposite perspective, however, singer/songwriter Janis Ian believes the free dissemination of her work on the Net music (with the proper permissions) helps her career. ZDNET explains.

  5. Tech for monitoring kids (offline)

    It looks a bit like the companies cited in this Wired News piece are capitalizing on Americans' latest fears for their children, and the article does little to ease those concerns. But it does do a good job of rounding up the various technologies now on the market for tracking and monitoring children's movements at school and beyond.

  6. Aussie national Web porn collection?

    Adult Web sites will be included in Australia's National Collection of Electronic Publications. VNUNET reports that, as National Librarian Edgar Crook explained to the Sydney Morning Herald, "the erotica collection is a valuable part of the library as any examination of the society and culture of a period by necessity involves the study of its sexual activities."

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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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