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October 4, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

There's a new email-borne virus you need to know about right away. See item No. 1 in Web News Briefs below. Already today, we've been receiving an infected email (with a viral attachment that we do not open!) about once every half hour, so please alert everyone at your house not to open attachments to emails from anyone they don't know! Here's our lineup for this first week of October:


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Family Tech

  1. MP3 players are for the whole family

    SafeKids.com's Larry Magid never used to think of portable MP3 players or any other music player designed primarily to be used with headphones as "family technology." "My wife considers headphones a form of social isolationism and refuses to let our kids wear them in the car," Larry writes in his latest column for the San Jose Mercury News. But lately he's changed his mind. "After connecting [Apple's iPod] to the cassette deck of our family minivan as well as to our home stereo system, I'm convinced that this general category of devices - players that store music on hard disks - is also the ultimate family listening device. In fact, it has the potential of bringing tranquility to our family car trips and a lot less clutter around the stereo system in our family living room." Read on to see why (you'll love the Magids' solution to differing music tastes on family car trips). Larry thoughtfully goes into types of products, prices, and family applications - positives and negatives.

  2. Broadband for the rest of us?

    Most US families live in areas where high-speed Net access is available, but - as Larry points out in "Getting on the Broadband Bandwagon" - only 10% have such access. Why? Cost is the biggest factor, and the barrier that might be called techno-phobia or sheer inconvenience is probably equally high. But both those barriers are coming down. In this column, Larry looks at the lowering cost and increasing ease of getting into broadband - as well as reasons why many Americans have made the leap.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Watch out for the new virus!

    Known as "Tanatos" and "Bugbear," the new email-borne virus is a good example of the kind that malicious hackers use to "hijack" home PCs. According to ITworld, it attacks PCs with Microsoft operating systems (like Windows) and - among other things - opens a "back door" to the computers it infects so remote attackers can have complete access to anything on them, just as the PCs' owners would. "The virus file is attached to emails with a wide variety of subject lines such as 'bad news,' 'Membership Confirmation,' 'Market Update Report,' and 'Your Gift,' and appears to use randomly-generated names to avoid detection by antivirus software," ITworld reports. The virus also shuts down "scores of vital processes used by Windows and by antivirus software, records user keystrokes ... and attempts to mail copies of itself out to other users, randomly generating new subject lines and virus executable names as it does." ZDNet UK says it also tries to steal passwords and credit card information. Here's CNET's coverage too.

  2. Report: Net access in US public schools

    Ninety-nine percent of US public schools and 87% of classrooms were connected to the Internet in fall of 2001, according to the latest numbers available. The figures are from the National Center for Education Statistics just-released annual report on school connectivity. A digital divide still shows up in the numbers: For example, "schools with the highest poverty concentration (75% or more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) had fewer rooms with Internet access than schools with less than 35% eligible students and schools with 35-49% eligible students (79% of instructional rooms compared with 90% and 89%, respectively." But the situation is improving. The number of Net-connected classrooms (at higher-poverty-level schools) had increased between 2000 and 2001, the study shows - "from 60% to 79% percent in schools with the highest concentration of poverty." Another notable change was the type of connection: In 1996, dial-up Internet connections were used by 74% of public schools. In 2001 85% had high-speed connections.

  3. Child porn raids in Europe

    Police raids throughout Europe have turned up more than 1,000 suspects the way lifting a rock reveals a whole colony of ants. As Reuters characterizes it (via ZDNet UK), the raids point to "a sordid Internet underworld of sexual exploitation which belies the apparent respectability of those involved. " Police, judges, and schoolteachers were among the suspects, as has been the case in the United States. Meanwhile, an in-depth Wired magazine article this month takes a more granular, possibly courageous, look at what might cause people to view such material on the Web and the changing dynamics of how child-porn cases are prosecuted in the US.

    Also this week Save the Children makes the case, as reported in Oslo's Aftenposten, that too many child porn cases (half) are being left unresolved. And UK police claim a lack of resources is keeping them from arresting hundreds of suspects, reports The Guardian. Our thanks to QuickLinks for pointing these pieces out.

  4. Controversial new Kazaa

    Just about anything the Kazaa music file-sharing service does is controversial, of course. But the service's latest software upgrade is especially likely to ruffle litigating record companies' feathers, according to CNET. Like StreamCast Networks' Morpheus, "the new Kazaa allows searches by 'playlist,' letting groups of songs be downloaded as a single item," CNET reports. Note the opposing views on what this means: Kazaa's makers "tout this as a way for people to share diverse lists of songs by different artists, while warning against trading copyrighted works. In reality, this new option provides a new, simple way to download albums all at once instead of song by song." Another new feature is a way to get around record companies' effort to combat piracy by paying contractors to corrupt or falsify MP3 music files that file-sharers can download (record companies and contractors say they don't plant viruses in the files, but parents and kids should be alert to the possibility). CNET says a whole cottage industry of companies that do this file-corrupting has sprung up. Another new feature allows users to rate music files "so that corrupt or false files will quickly collect ratings poor enough to warn people away from downloading them." Kazaa's parent company, Sharman Networks (reportedly based for tax reasons on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu), along with Streamcast Networks and Grokster, is scheduled to meet record companies and movie studios in court on Dec. 2.

    In the meantime, more and more online music fans are now "paying the piper," the New York Times reports. Even diehard advocates of illegal file-swapping are subscribing to fee-based, copyright-protecting online music services, and the Times explores why.

  5. Gory games banned in St. Louis

    Video game companies are fighting a real-world battle in court to reverse a St. Louis County ordinance banning the sale of violent games to minors. "The [$8 billion] video-game industry's message hasn't wavered in a decade: Games don't kill people, people do," reports Wired News, referring to the crux of game companies' argument in St. Louis this time: "Studies that persuaded a district court judge that violence in games causes children to behave violently were distorted." Leading with the St. Louis case, Wired takes a good snapshot of where US society is with research and debate on the impact of violence in media, citing the fact that more than 1,300 studies have been conducted on the subject, with no direct link yet made "between playing violent games and perpetrating real-world violence." One expert out to prove a connection told Wired he expects a new round of studies to come out in the coming year will make the connection.

  6. Parent-child surfing promoted

    Schools throughout the UK this week held Internet workshops that were ultimately aimed at parents. According to the BBC, the Department for Education and Skills "hopes that the week's activities will spark long-term commitment from schools to provide out-of-hours Net support for parents." The workshops focused on parents and children using the Education Department's "Parents Online" Web site to take age-appropriate "journeys" together. According to the site, the tours take them to "three sites, specially selected for each age group [under-5s, 5-7, 7-11, 11-14, 14-16, and 16+], that give you and your children a taste of what the Internet can offer." According to the BBC, the Department's three-year-old Web site "has attracted interest from nearly a thousand schools, which have all agreed to provide some form of Net activities for parents and children. It is beginning to attract international attention from schools as far away as Afghanistan. Swedish and Israeli schools have also registered on the site."

  7. 'ICQ Lite'

    For parents' purposes, an update from CNET on a new, more basic version of AOL's popular ICQ instant-messaging system gives a quick overview of the IM phenomenon. ICQ (clever play on "I seek you") was founded in Israel and is the more international of AOL's two IM services (the other is AIM), which are also the two largest. Targeting first-time users, "ICQ Lite focuses on the basic elements of instant-messaging such as real-time text exchange and a search engine for other ICQ users. The software lets people send messages to cell phone users via SMS (Short Message Service) and transfer files, and it offers multilingual support," CNET reports.

  8. Online mentoring

    It's a program designed to support young people who have "aged out" of foster care. To illustrate, ConnectforKids.org tells the story of David Ahlgren, who at 18 was literally left on a street corner with his personal belongings and with no financial support. Working several jobs simultaneously, he "came up with the money to attend Central Oklahoma University, thanks in large part to a scholarship from the Orphan Foundation of America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping young people move out of foster care and into adult life." The same foundation hooked him up with an "eMentor" who helps with big and small questions about work, housing, finances - just about anything that might come up. So far, the eMentoring program "serves about 160 students. Funded in large part by Casey Family Programs, the program costs about $1,200 per student.... Currently, 1,700 mentors are waiting in the wings.... They go through a screening process that includes an FBI background check. Their eight-hour training includes 'netiquette,' the proper role of a mentor, and the special characteristics of the foster care population, many of whom have been abandoned by adults throughout their lives."

  9. Iraqis allowed (limited) Net access

    Iraqis "can now surf the Web and send e-mail to their hearts' content - as long as they do it via the government-controlled service provider monitored by Saddam's agents," according to the San Jose Mercury News. So it's probably a good thing that there's no instant messaging, no wireless networks, and no private Hotmail accounts. "Iraqis say there is nothing illegal about reading the Web sites of Western news organizations, and Web sites that present political views that clash with the official party line appear to be accessible. But visiting them risks incurring the government's wrath," the Mercury News reports. Restrictions on Net use apparently haven't deterred Iraqis, since cybercafes have sprung up all over Baghdad, and even in religiously conservative Karbala, in recent months.

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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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