October 15, 2004
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Here's our lineup for this second week of October:
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The IM life of middle-schoolers, Part
3: Home tech options
"How can we track their instant-messaging?" was a
question parents asked school counselor Amanda in the middle of a school community
IM crisis. That's a question not many people can answer. SafeKids.com's Larry
Magid tackled it for the New
York Times, saying parents' monitoring and protection strategies depend
on the IM system their kids use.
And that, I'd add, usually depends on the system everybody
else in their peer group uses. It would be nigh impossible to get a kid to
switch systems - AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, whatever - if all her friends use something
different and can't reach her on the parent-imposed one. (To use a techie
term, IM systems, regrettably, are not "interoperable.")
The most control, Larry points out, is available to
MSN and AOL subscriber parents ("EarthLink and some cable and DSL providers
also offer parental controls" - check with your Internet service provider).
He explains how so.
Larry also mentions some parental control products
that either block IM altogether or monitor and record online conversations.
"Although to some people, recording a child's conversations constitutes an
invasion of privacy, others believe that it is justified in the interest of
protection," he writes, wisely adding that it's wise not to let these tools
"lure you into a false sense of security." All the basic online-safety rules
need still apply at your house, right?: Never give out name, location, phone
number, or any other info that IDs personally and never meet someone face-to-face
you've encountered online (and certainly not alone). Some examples of software
that detects, monitors, and records IM conversations are Spector PRO & eBlaster
(see Software4Parents.com),
Guardian Monitor (see GuardianSoftware.com),
and p2pLog (see WinPlanet).
Filters such as Kidsnet and NetNanny
can also block instant-messaging altogether.
However, "control" must be qualified. Blocking, monitoring,
etc. don't help a bit if the child establishes and uses his/her own IM account
at, say, a friend's house or anywhere they can go online (these accounts are
free). Then there's cell-phone IM-ing/texting, which happens a lot in schools
that don't have rules against it because it's stealth communications - this
generation's version of passing notes, only the conversing parties can be
in the same classroom or anywhere else. I noticed that it's available on most
reasonably new cell phones now; Verizon's version costs 2 cents for each incoming
message, 10 cents for each one your child sends (read all about it at VerizonWireless.com).
Those charges can add up, and will keep doing so unless you have the phone
company block the service. Verizon blocked it for me, but I had to call and
ask them to - and they didn't volunteer that info.
Fifteen percent of the 53 million IM users have sent
messages via cell phone, hand-held, or wireless laptop, according to Pew Internet
& American Life figures cited by the New
York Times, and one-quarter of 18-to-27-year-olds have used IM wirelessly;
younger people are even earlier adopters.
The bottom line is, if IM-ing is a key part of a child's
social life, real parental control can be tough, at least it's certainly not
all about technology. It's also about how involved we are in their online
experiences, what policies we've established for PC and cell phone use, their
level of compliance with such, and how much they're online outside the home.
Keeping in touch with fellow parents on our kids' buddy lists can help a lot
too (see "A mom writes:
IM impersonations," 10/1).
Related resources
Email me about your family's experiences with instant-messaging! Your comments and stories can be very helpful to fellow readers. The address: anne@netfamilynews.org
Here are Part
1 (home front) and Part
2 (school's role) of this series.
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- Get the 7 new critical patches!
Microsoft told all Windows PC owners to download
patches to 21 new flaws it found, USATODAY
reports. The announcement came in the company's routine monthly security
advisory, but "the number of serious flaws was higher than expected."
Microsoft advises all home PC users to go to this
page and - if they haven't already - sign up for its free Windows
Automatic Update service.
- Desktop search: Big new thing
Google announced it, then AOL immediately announced
it was testing one, a feature in the stand-along Web browser it's developing
(for everyone, including non-AOL subscribers). Ask Jeeves will soon announce
its desktop tool too. What it means is searching for stuff on your family
PC as easily and quickly as you search on the Web. But WAIT, there's an
important caveat: privacy and PC security in this "new era of search,"
as SearchEngineWatch
put it. "It's not new that computers have sensitive data that needs to
be protected. What is new is how desktop search centralizes that data
and makes it more accessible. This is only an issue if someone gets physical
access to your computer, of course. If you log off and use a secure password,
that will be a huge deterrent." Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know
enough to do that. I'll keep you posted as I learn more about how worth
it this "convenient" new tool really is. Here's the Associated
Press on "How Google's Desktop Search Works," the Washington
Post's thorough article on it (adding that desktop search is coming
to MSN too), and CNET
on AOL's project.
- Supreme Court nixes RIAA case
For a while, in its effort to make it as easy
as possible to sue music swappers, the music industry had a practice,
with subpoenas, of forcing Internet service providers to reveal their
customers' identities without notifying the customers. Verizon was the
first ISP to refuse to comply. Last December a federal appeals court said
ISPs didn't have to comply with the bulk subpoenas (for which the RIAA
argued, citing the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA), so the
RIAA took its case to the Supreme Court.
This week the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's
rejection of the RIAA's tactic, Internet
News reports. The RIAA's response was that the decision "will not
deter [its] ongoing anti-piracy efforts." It's a big story this week.
According to the Dow
Jones Newswires, the decision "could impact other pending copyright
litigation efforts by the music industry." Here's Reuters
too. Interestingly, this week a UK court did just the opposite - it ordered
British ISPs to reveal their file-sharing customers' identities at the
request of the British Phonographic Association, the RIAA's UK counterpart,
CNET reports.
- P2P-ers gone underground
Have all the RIAA's lawsuits really helped reduce
file-sharing? A little bit, but they've also sent lots of tune-swappers
underground, PC
World reports. By "underground," the article means to smaller, lesser-known
services than Kazaa, whose numbers have gone from a peak of 30 million
to about 18 million (e.g., BitTorrent nearly doubled in users between
11/03 and 5/04 and eMule almost tripled between 2/03 and 2/04). Besides
lower risk of detection for their users, these smaller services are more
attractive than Kazaa because they offer faster downloading. They "use
an advanced technique called 'swarming,' in which portions of files are
downloaded from multiple sources and immediately offered to the network."
File-sharers have also moved to the good ol' Usenet newsgroups that were
around long before Napster, the first P2P service, arrived on the scene.
Newsgroups are "a vast reservoir of music, movies, and software, at connection
speeds that can put the better-known P-to-P services to shame," according
to PC World. Fueling Usenet's new-found popularity is free and easy-to-use
software like the Xnews reader (see if it's on your family PC), which
makes newsgroups file-sharing more reliable than the P2P services. The
downside is, Usenet's more public and trackable than, say, BitTorrent.
Your kids will probably tell you which service
they're using to download tunes, if they are at all, and (if it's a P2P
service) ideally you'll go into the software together to see how it's
configured to protect the other files on the family computer. If not,
some monitoring software - e.g., Spector
Pro, Guardian Monitor,
and Media Fence - detects file-sharing
activity and identifies the P2P programs being used on your PC. As for
the risks involved (privacy, PC security, porn, legal, etc.), see "File-sharing
realities for families," 5/28/04.
- Teens on screens
Sixteen-year-old Cassie Leap hated "these stupid
online journal things" when she first started blogging two years ago,
the St.
Petersburg (Fla.) Times reports. But for some reason she's stuck with
it. Because research data is scarce, I link you to every article I run
into on kids' cybersocializing, because each offers insights and at least
anecdotal evidence of a scene still very unfamiliar to parents. One bit
of data I wish we had is on whether teenagers are aware of the safeguards
available to them in most blogging communities. Most of them - LiveJournal,
Blurty, Xanga,
Teen Open Diary, etc. - are
public, but bloggers don't have to use their real name (most do use screennames
instead, I suspect), and usually they can create a password that peers
have to know in order to read their journal and/or post comments. Of course,
some teens probably establish passwords more so their parents can't
read the journal, but that's better than everybody in the surfing public
being able to read their closely held secrets (or finding them via a search
engine). "Cassie's parents know their daughter spends $25 a year for a
page hosted by Xanga.com," the Times say. "But she rarely shows it to
them. It's for her and her friends, she says, like a phone call or an
Instant Message." Do they go there every now and then? Yes. Her dad said
he looks in on the online part of Cassie's life every now and then.
- Teens, chat, predators: 2 cases
It makes for tough reading for parents, because
at the time of the crime the victim was 10 years old, but the details
help us understand how these relatively rare cases of online predation
happen. In most cases the child thinks s/he's going to meet someone who
cares about him or her. According to the Toronto
Star, the girl in this case "met" the perpetrator, Sergio Arana Martinez,
35, in an online chat room, saying she was 13. Within a month, "the relationship
between the two evolved from chat rooms to emails to phone calls" to an
encounter in Martinez's apartment, the Star reports. Arana Martinez was
found guilty on three counts, faces two more unresolved charges of sexual
assault, and will be sentenced later this month in Ontario Superior Court.
In Covington County, Ga., this week, a 15-year-old girl was allegedly
sexually assaulted in her own bedroom by a man she'd "met" days before
in an online chat room, the Newton
Citizen reports. She had invited him to her house and let him in but
reportedly "had no idea of his intentions."
For context on these cases, see "Rethinking 'stranger
danger'," the National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children's take on this in "Non-stranger
danger", and a link to the University
of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center's latest research
on the subject. Thanks to BNA Internet
Law for pointing the Toronto story out and to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for the Covington County,
Ga., story.
- Japan's Net suicide tragedy
Japanese police have found the bodies of nine
people, some of them teenagers, believed to have committed suicide because
of suicide-pact Web sites. "Japan has recently seen a wave of Internet-linked
suicides, as people seek companions to die with," the BBC
reports, adding that more than 34,000 people committed suicide in
Japan last year, a small increase from the 2002 figure. According to the
New
York Times, "Japan has a suicide rate about twice the rate of the
United States, and there are Web sites where people discuss suicide and
suicide techniques. Some Web sites even sell kits offering 'painless'
suicide."
- 'HIPSchools' helps students, etc.
HIPSchools is a program founded by a former Pittsburgh
Steeler to get parents involved in their kids' education and, Wired
News reports, it turned around Brooklyn's Walt Whitman Middle School
246, which had been deemed a failure by the state of New York. "The school
has seen distinct improvement in the performance of its 1,300 students,
as well as regular attendance, which has risen to 98% (an increase of
over 10%) in the last two years," according to Wired News, and it is now
off the state's list of "Schools Under Registration Review," which it
was on for three years. Now used by more than 60 US schools, the HIPSchools
system lets teachers post homework assignments
and announcements on a Web site, where they can be viewed anytime. It
also sends parents individual messages (via email, phone, fax, test-messaging,
whatever the preference) about anything from kids' tardiness to meeting
times to school projects.
* * * *
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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor
Net Family News
