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Welcome to the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and thanks to everyone who's just subscribed! Please invite friends and colleagues to sign up and help us to help grownups stay informed about children's safe, constructive use of the Internet. Email us anytime!

 

February 13, 2004

Dear Subscribers:

We like to think this newsletter's for everybody - Net users of all levels. But every now and then we hear the gentle criticism that it's geared for the slightly more tech-literate parent or teacher. To remedy that, this week we're starting a series of basic online-safety tips for the home from an online safety expert at home, at work, and in his community: Detective (and dad of 2 teenagers) Bob Williams in Greenwich, Connecticut. This week, an introduction and his Rule No. 1.

And here's the complete lineup for this second week of February:


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From Det. Bob Williams: Basic Net safety at home, Part 1

Having two daughters in elementary and middle school had a lot to do with Bob Williams's interest in Internet crimes against children six years ago. He'd been a police officer for nearly 20 years, but the Net's popularity with kids pointed to a whole new area of police work. He noticed an increase in Net-related cases among teenagers, including "harassment, threats of school violence, and attempts to entice a minor to engage in sex," he told us. He also noticed that "the parents of these children that received the unwanted messages didn't have a clue how the computer or Internet worked. I advised my supervisors that the Internet is the new frontier, and training is required."

Many training seminars - in protecting young Net users, tracking child predators online, and computer forensics - later, Detective Williams is now Youth Officer in the Greenwich, Conn., Police Department's Criminal Investigation Division, and about 30% of his caseload concerns the Internet (he also spends considerable time educating fellow parents about kids on the Net).

We asked Bob what sorts of cases parents can bring him. "If a parent feels their child has been threatened with bodily harm, is in danger, or is being harassed online, they should contact the local police department. There are Connecticut state laws in place regarding harassment by telephone or other electronic devices which allow me to pursue these complaints. Not all of the investigations end in criminal court. Most of the cases are resolved with a trip to the police station for a talk or a telephone call to the parent because the child was not aware that his online activity can be traced."

* * *
Detective Williams's Tip No. 1 - The key to a safe, constructive experience for children surfing the Internet is Parental Supervision.

"Six years ago my partner got a call from a frantic parent of an 11-year-old boy. The mother said (snail) mail from all over the United States, addressed to her son, was being delivered to their house. Upon opening the letters the mother found cash and checks. She requested that the police look into this.

"My partner met with the mother and son after school and presented her concerns to the boy. The child said he had many duplicate Pokemon cards, so he went online, built a free Web page, scanned the cards, and posted their photos on the Web page for sale.

"The mother was somewhat embarrassed because she didn't know about the free Web page - her son obviously didn't tell her - but she was relieved to locate the problem and started closely supervising her son's activities. He learned a lesson too: that he was lucky a predator didn't reach out to him.

"I share this case to remind parents about how important it is to keep up with your child's Net activities. Ask questions, stop at the computer when your child is online, and ask about who he or she is IM-ing or emailing. How does she know that person online? Where online activities are concerned, parents can't be their child's friend. Just be the concerned parent."

Readers, comments or questions are welcome. We're happy to pass them along to Bob via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Digital ID for kids?

    Net security company VeriSign demo'd digital identity tokens for schoolchildren on Capitol Hill this week, CNET reports. Part of an online-safety program to be piloted in Kentucky and Nebraska, the tokens will be provided for free at school to students 12-17. The tokens will plug into computers' USB ports and "will allow children to encrypt email, to access kid-safe sites, and to purchase items that require a digital signature," according to CNET, which adds that more than 48 million US 12-to-17- year-olds regularly use the Internet (and a projected 77 million by next year).

    We asked two favorite online-safety experts for their take on this:

    Net-mom Jean Armour Polly: "I think the scheme is a marketer's dream. They have the kid's name, her school, all the demographics they need to really target those sales messages. If they want, they can target just 12-year-olds going to an upscale school in a particular city. I thought the whole idea of online safety was to limit the amount of marketing splashed onto kids' eyeballs. Plus, what happens when a kid finds out someone else will pay for his 'I am a kid' key fob credentials? EBay, here they come! I can imagine a ready group of pedophile buyers."

    SafeKids.com's Larry Magid: "While I can appreciate the motivation to create such an idea, I question whether it might be abused. I'd hate to see an ID get into the wrong hands. Teenagers frequently forge adults IDs to get into bars or buy liquor. I'd hate to see adults forging kid IDs." And we wonder if it wouldn't be more useful for VeriSign to provide digital ID tech for all ages - seems safer than singling out children.

  2. 'Stranger danger' & UK's youngest chatters: Study

    Fewer UK 8-to-11-year-olds who have tried online chat are becoming regular chat users these days, but more report having face-to-face meetings with people they "meet" in chat, a University of Lancashire study reports. The study's author, Rachel O'Connell told The Register that, though more children are aware of basic online safety sense, the message about face-to-face meetings with strangers is not getting through (more than 60% said they were unaware that people in chatrooms may not be who they say they are). "The proportion of regular chat users who attend face-to-face meetings has risen from 10% in 2002 to 24% last year," Professor O'Connell wrote in a commentary in The Guardian. It's "a hardcore of young users who are engaging in increasingly risky behaviour" that needs a different approach to education now, she wrote. Her group's study, commissioned by the British government, was released in conjunction with Europe's Safer Internet Day last Friday. The study also found that parental supervision is up in the UK (60% of 8-to-11-year-olds reported that parents supervised their Net use in 2003, up from 50% in 2002). Here's the complete report in pdf format.

  3. Virus protection for 'cheapskates'

    Though the visible signs of the MyDoom epidemic (zillions of emails with attachments in your in-box) are gone, computer security experts believe there are thousands of infected computers, Wired News reports in "Cheapskate's Guide to a Safe PC." The problem is, it's hard to tell if your PC's infected. The only thing you might notice is that it's moving a little more slowly. What you can't tell is that it now has a "backdoor," or "Trojan" (installed by MyDoom) that lets any malicious hacker take control of your machine and use it to launch mass attacks against "enemies" like Microsoft or do anything else s/he pleases, using your computer as if s/he is you. But that's not all. Wired News quotes one security expert as saying there's a strong possibility that infected computers have other nasties installed too - other viruses, spyware, and "all sorts of garbage." Best to delete that garbage!

    How? For PC owners who don't want to purchase McAfee or Symantec anti-virus software, Wired News mentions the free tools out on the Net that, in some cases, "work better than similar commercial products" - SpamBayes, Spybot, and the Mozilla Web browser. Then it explains firewalls (a new, free alternative to ZoneAlarm is Agnitum's) and virus scanning (including the free scanner at Trend Micro), and PC-disinfecting. There are even free scan-and-disinfect tools for (home) networks. This very helpful article, written for you and me, also has recommendations for dealing with spam and spyware (software inadvertently downloaded on your PC that tracks your activities and slows the system down).

  4. From 'MyDoom' to 'DoomJuice'

    Two new worms called "DoomJuice" and "DeadHat" have been circulating this week, but they're only using PCs already infected with MyDoom, CNET reports. If your system seems slow and you haven't scanned for viruses lately, now would be a good time to see if you need to close a "backdoor" that MyDoom may have opened on your family PC (see the item above for more info). A later CNET piece has experts' speculation on the motivations of the writer of DoomJuice.

  5. Apply this week's patch

    Besides the firewall and virus-disinfecting steps, there's one more vital PC security precaution for Windows users: Microsoft's ever-more-frequent critical updates, or patches. This week the company issued another top-priority one, the New York Times reports. Though Microsoft says there's no evidence this new security flaw has been used in attacks, the Times reports that this one, like a sort of digital AIDS, "could allow attacks on the equivalent of the computer's immune system" and, like MyDoom, could make it vulnerable to outside control. Fortunately, it's not an easy flaw for hackers to take advantage of (but they thrive on challenges like this). Here's where to go for security updates at Microsoft and here's ZDNet UK's coverage.

    For anyone interested in what things look like from inside the virus writers' community, here's a fascinating story in this week's New York Times Magazine.

  6. 'Net-related child abuse on the rise'

    The UK's largest children's charity, Barnardo's, this week called on the British government to develop a program to protect child victims of Net-related sexual abuse and help those who have been abused "put their lives back together," .The Register reports. The statement was part of a report Barnardo's issued which found that more children are being sexually abused because of the Internet, and new videophone technology will potentially aggravate the problem, the BBC reported. "A UK-wide survey by the charity of its own services found 83 children had been sexually abused via the Internet or camera phones. Of those, seven had been sold online to paedophiles and one had been abused live on the Web." These numbers, Barnardo's suggested, are just the "tip of the iceberg," because children typically don't easily talk about their abuse, which is "often carried out by relatives and friends." One of the tragic Internet-related elements of this is that "young people who are recovering from child sex abuse feel their recovery is hindered because they know these images are out there somewhere in the virtual world" (it's extremely difficult for anyone to track down and remove them once in circulation). Here's The Independent's coverage and Barnardo's press release, as well as its full report. And here's some context from a BBC commentary last August.

  7. Mac and AOL users now can chat

    Macintosh users can now do video chat with AOL's some 60 million instant- messaging account holders who have Web video cameras, the Associated Press reported this week. The AP bills the development as another example of Apple's fairly new push toward "interoperability," opening up its customers' previously enclosed little online world.

    Interoperability is generally seen as a good thing - something out of reach because of this yucky thing called corporate competition. But it has a downside, especially in the video chat area. Parents may want to be extra alert when their kids go online with Web cams on. A recent "tour" through AIM chatrooms, regardless of topic (movies, fashion, etc.) had endless come-ons inviting participants to "see me on my Webcam" (see "Closer look at 'camgirls' sites," 2/7/03). Some are innocuous, some all about cybersex. Internet crimes expert Det. Mike Sullivan in Illinois recently told us, "The biggest thing I find parents uneducated about is the Webcam and the use of Webcams by the predators and how dangerous these are to children." Pedophiles use them to capture and circulate child pornography.

  8. Net search & your privacy

    In an eye-opening article, a guy who makes his living testing computer and network security in seconds showed the Washington Post how he could type a few words into a search engine and turn up "what appeared to be a military document listing suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members, date of birth, place of birth, passport numbers, and national identification numbers." Other searched turned up names and associated "credit card numbers, medical records, bank account numbers, students' grades, and the docking locations of 804 US Navy ships, submarines and destroyers." Some people call it "Google hacking," but it can be done on any search engine by people not much more "techie" than you and me. Why? The Post cites some reasons: search engines have gotten a lot more powerful and more and more businesses and government agencies are using the Net to share information, all of it stored on servers - computers linked to the Internet. Then there's a general security laxity that's been growing - "improperly configured servers, holes in security systems, human error." So, the Post continues, "a wide assortment of material not intended to be viewed by the public is, in fact, publicly available."

  9. Whitehouse.com for sale

    But it's in a seedy neighborhood. The porn version of the site that many a young surfer trying to find information on the place where the US president lives and works can stumble upon is being sold by proprietor Daniel Parisi. The reason, Mr. Parisi told the Associated Press, is because "he's worried what his preschool-age son might think." Now there's an interesting answer to online porn, or at least it would wipe out a decent percentage of it: Let them become parents! The correct URL, parents and teachers have been telling kids since 1997, when the dot-com version launched, is *www.whitehouse.gov.* Parisi says the urgency is because his son is now in kindergarten, but the AP report suggests other motivations: "Parisi's decision to sell the Whitehouse.com name and more than 100 derivations comes amid signs pointing to a rebound in the market for reselling Web addresses." He claims the dot-com site earns more than $1 million a year in revenue. (Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this item out.)

  10. Silence for 99 cents

    Yep, iTunes also sells silence. There are at least nine tracks of it available among the thousands of audible ones at iTunes, CNET reports, all with 30-second previews. Nine of them, titled "Silent," are by hip-hop group Slum Village, then there's "Silence" by Ciccone Youth (off The Whitey Album) and "Silence" by Bill Schaeffer (from the album Grain of Sand), and - a departure - "One Minute of Silence" by Project Grudge, offered only as a single-song download. Well, one might think, this is an interesting new way to turn the volume of life down: download some digital peace of mind at a new low, low price. But it's actually nothing new, CNET points out: "Historically, there has been a market for inaudible music. Most famously, composer John Cage composed "4'33"," a 1952 piece that features just over four and a half minutes without sound. The BBC broadcast a live performance of the piece earlier this year - featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra, no less." We do wonder if copyright lawsuits will ensue, though!

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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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