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January 31, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

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


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Young activists online

As you read this, young people are using the Net to...


All this and more is celebrated by this year's Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards. The winners, selected from among this year's finalists (the short list was released today), will be announced in April at a ceremony in London. Here's a bit more on three finalists in the Individuals category (other categories, represented in the bullets above, are Not for Profit, Schools, and New to the Net, as well as a special individual teacher award):

"Stretch when traveling fast. Squash when slowing down or hitting something. Use anticipation to make animation exciting, as in comedy." Those are just three of the basic rules 16-year-old Australian Andrew Fei offers in the animation tutorials in his Web site, Kidzdom.com. He taught himself, then wanted to share what he learned with everybody - both his own very animated characters (check out the slightly mischievous skateboarder "kid," as in young goat) and his process (with tips for both drawing and animating using flip-books). The Childnet judges commend this site because its "simple, nonverbal cartoons communicate beyond language and culture."

Twelve-year-old Briton Sarah Bowler didn't create a Web site - Cool Kids for a Cool Climate - that just tells us in a kid-friendly way how our car and air travels contribute to global warming, she offers solutions. For one, the planting of trees to "help nature soak up that extra carbon dioxide pollution" we're sending into Earth's atmosphere. But she didn't stop there. She teamed up with the South Yorkshire Forest Project to help plant trees in her own community and promote the practice worldwide.

Daily Prophet - a Harry Potter fan site created by then-15-year-old (now 17), home-schooled, Virginia-based Heather Lawver - now has more than 100 children worldwide writing for it as columnists (all of their work edited and posted by Heather herself). Any Harry Potter fan would enjoy checking out their very readable "bios", and Heather's own blog lets you inside her slightly irreverent teenager's head, with her reaction on hearing she was a Childnet Awards finalist. The Daily Prophet illustrates the power of both the Internet and Harry Potter! Childnet's judges tell us that when, in 2000 and '01, Warner Bros. threatened a number of Harry Potter fan sites, "the Daily Prophet led a boycott and became the first fan organization to take on a major multinational corporation and win."

We also have to tell you about two other remarkable finalists (from other categories):

  1. YouthNOISE.com is about "maximum volume. It's about the racket a bunch of young people can generate when they get together to make their voices heard." No one can say it better than they. What the Childnet judges like about YouthNOISE is, "the site 'feels' like it belongs to the people who write for it." So it really does give young activists a voice - they actually come to the site, contribute, and are respected, even empowered there. Topics they cover include war & peace, politics, celebrity, self-abuse, children's rights, youth activism, child exploitation, gun violence, AIDS, and intolerance. Action is encouraged and solutions are offered, in the stories of teen activists themselves as well as in a section called "Top 10" (e.g., "Top 10 Things You Shouldn't Do if Someone You Know is Depressed" and "10 Things You Can Do About a War with Iraq Whether You're For or Against"). The site is an initiative of Save the Children Federation, Inc., a "nonpartisan, nonsectarian, nonprofit organization" with a presence in more than 46 countries."

  2. Educators at home and school, don't miss Bonjour.org.uk, winner of this year's Special Individual Teacher Award. Now with German and Spanish versions, it was developed by Stephane Derone, a UK-based tech and French teacher. The site is "a real labour of love from one individual teacher who has responded to a need to produce language resources in an accessible, fun, and relevant way," Childnet's judges say. Stephane's sites, now being used by thousands of schools around the world, include games, quizzes, and exercises in their respective languages. Here's his English-language info page about all the sites.

Always feel free to email us your family's or class's favorite sites - and why you like them. We love to pass those very helpful endorsements along to your fellow parents and educators.

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Family Tech: Picture-taking cell phone?!

SafeKids.com's Larry Magid saw a lot of electronic gadgets at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, but this is the little item he actually chose to write about in his latest syndicated column. It's the 4-ounce Sanyo SCP-5300, a cell phone, digital camera, calculator, portable Web browser, pocket-size game console, e-mail terminal, personal calendar and organizer all rolled into one. It also downloads and stores music files.

And why, you might ask, would one want a camera cell phone? "Aside from the fact that you can instantly e-mail pictures or post them to the Web," Larry writes, "the big advantage is that having a camera as part of your phone means you're likely to have it with you all the time. I carry a good digital camera on vacations and when I know I'm going to be taking pictures, but unlike my cell phone, I don't carry it with me wherever I go. Now, thanks to the cell phone/camera, I do have a camera with me at all times, albeit not the best camera in the world." Larry goes on to say that it came a handy recently when he got a parking ticket he felt he didn't deserve. He took pictures to prove his innocence. Hmm, is a potential legal digital divide afoot?

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Web News Briefs

  1. Teen-designed Web browser

    Sixteen-year-old Adnan Osmani of Mullingar, Ireland, spent two years coding what he calls the "Xwebs megabrowser" for an annual school science competition, Wired News Reports. The Xwebs sounds great. It comes with 120 search engines, all the major media players, a DVD player, and an HTML (Web coding language) editor, and it is said to be 600 times faster than the browsing we currently do with Explorer and Netscape. The 600X figure has not been confirmed, but Adnan explained that he developed an algorithm that "speeds up the way information is handled inside the browser," Wired News adds. "The browser handles multiple requests for information, he said. So, instead of a single stream of information, several streams are processed simultaneously." But the competition judges didn't even factor in the browser's speed, saying in any case that the software and its creator's programming skills are of the level of a university senior's final project (maybe higher?). Here's the Esat BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition on the Web.

    Meanwhile, a Norwegian student who developed a Napster-knock-off music-swapping service (Napster.no) for a school project has been fined by a court for music piracy. Reuters quotes one of the plaintiffs - the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - as saying Napster.no was Norway's most high-profile music piracy site, and the court's verdict was an important victory. The defendant, Frank Bruvik, was fined 100,000 crowns, or about $14,500.

  2. Online kid-porn commentary

    It's a useful follow-on to an ongoing discussion about how to deal with Net-based child porn, its producers, circulators, and users (see our 'The Net's role in pedophilia' last week). The commentary in Wired News is by Lauren Weinstein who, his bio says, "has been involved with the Internet for decades, beginning with ARPANET. He is the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, the creator and moderator of the Privacy Forum and an outspoken commentator on technology and society." For one thing, he writes, "the overwhelmingly vast majority of us consider child porn utterly disgusting. But as uncomfortable as it may make us, it's wise for us in an Internet world to consider carefully whether everyone who has contact with such materials should be painted with the same broad brush.... The Net has also made it possible for individuals who would never have come into contact with child porn in a non-Internet world to be sucked in with only a few mouse clicks." This is an important public discussion. Send in your comments on the subject.

  3. Prescription drug sales online: Landmark case

    That's how the Las Vegas Sun described an action against PrescriptionOnline.com. The Nevada State Board of Pharmacy fined the site a record $200,000 for, since July 2001, selling more than 5 million doses of hydrocodone, a painkiller linked to addiction. Smaller fines were levied against the pharmacists who filled the prescriptions for the Web company. The Sun indicates that the Pharmacy Board was sending a clear message about "the dangers of Internet pharmacies to the public." About 90% of the site's prescriptions were for painkillers, compared to the 15% found in the average walk-in pharmacy, the Sun reports.

    Meanwhile, a California doctor had his license revoked for prescribing online. He was also disciplined for prescribing pain killers without examining patients in person. According to the Victorville Daily Press, he was the first physician in California to have his license revoked for said. (Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing these articles out.)

  4. School Web sites keep parents in the loop

    Through a passworded Web site called eSchool, one mother found out her son was getting average grades in biology despite top grades on tests because he wasn't handing in all his homework assignments. According to the Washington Post, "that intelligence was the 'springboard' that got her past the typical conversation with James - 'How was your day?' 'Fine' - to the heart of the matter." Sites and software like eClass designed to get past the twin problems of time-strapped parents and "taciturn teenagers" are not new, but the Post reports that more and more schools are using them to get parents engaged. The Post looks at the pluses and minuses of such technology, from both parents' and educators' perspectives.

  5. Do not download Xupiter!

    It's not a virus, but it's just as insidious and annoying, and it's extremely difficult to get rid of. "It's a browser toolbar that some swear is doing 'drive-by downloads' - installing itself without users' permission - then taking over their systems and making it impossible to uninstall," Wired News reports. "It's registered to a company called Tempo Internet, in Gyongyos, Hungary. Calls and e-mails to Tempo were not returned." One of Wired's sources said sometimes it gets installed when people click "ok" on a pop-up ad without thinking, or when they intended to close the pop-up window. "Xupiter is also being bundled along with at least one peer-to-peer file-sharing program," so tell your whole family to be careful when they download Morpheus, Kazaa, etc. Here's one tip offered: "the toolbar will install itself automatically when Internet Explorer's security settings aren't set to the highest level."

  6. Leonardo da Vinci 'the geek'

    Why do hackers identify with Leonardo? He was unpopular, an outsider, loved to tinker, and passionate about his technical and scientific projects, suggests Wired News in an article about the original Renaissance man and an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman" (great for any Renaissance or art history lesson plan). "Leonardo described himself as 'unlettered' because he was unable to read Latin, the language used by other Renaissance intellectuals," Wired News reports. "Leonardo figured things out by looking at them, thinking about them and taking them apart. That compulsion to tinker has led many modern hackers to claim Leonardo retroactively as one of their own."

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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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