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Dear Subscribers:

A reminder: If you haven't already filled out our '99 survey, could you head on over there and fill out the form? If you're new to the newsletter this month, your experience is every bit as welcome. And many thanks to all of you who've already sent yours in. Here's our lineup for this third week of October:

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Web News Briefs

  1. Will they follow the rules?

    This week the Federal Trade Commission announced the privacy rules that Web sites for kids must follow if they gather children's personal information. They're the FTC's "fleshing out" of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, signed into law by President Clinton about a year ago. Now Web companies know how to comply with the law, which bans them from collecting children's data without a parent's permission.

    There have been a lot of media reports on this development (short list just below). One point that stood out to us is that - since this law's about the Internet industry and the technology that drives it changes so fast - these rules will be revisited in two years. That's a first for the FTC, and shows sensible flexibility on the government's part. Here are other key points: The NandoTimes does a nice job of summarizing this development. The article includes a useful list of links and "Tips on handling kids' privacy issues online". CNET's News.com gives a bit of history on COPPA and FTC investigation that led up to it.

    The New York Times clearly lays out what's expected of Web-sites-for-kids in getting parental permission for kids under 13 to chat online, and what getting our permission entails. And if you're a detail junkie, earlier in the month the Times ran a long, detailed background piece on the issues and players on both the government and the industry sides: "Online Industry Seizes the Initiative on Privacy".

    Do the FTC's rules ease any concerns you had about Web sites gathering your children's personal information? Do email us your thoughts.

  2. Net-use numbers: Students, the rest of us

    Two-thirds of US children who have a computer at home use it to do homework, and 85% of those kids also use the Internet for homework, according to a survey by NPD Online Research cited in CyberAtlas. As for parents, 75% of the 2,143 surveyed said that they personally monitor most of that Web activity. And 73% said their kids are using a computer at school. On the home front, the study says kids are using computers for special reports, as a reference tool, working with educational software, nightly homework, communicating with school friends, and preparing for standardized tests (like SATs) - in that order.

    Meanwhile, a much bigger survey by the US Census - a whopping 50,000 households and 125,000+ people - found that one in five Americans now use the Internet. Among women users, 70% go online at home, according to the Seattle Times report. And good news on the "digital divide" front: "Children who attend public schools have access to computers nearly equal to that of children in private schools." This is notable because public-school students tend to have less access to computers at home than private-school students do. About 75% of students in both types of school say they have access to computers at school. As to the sheer size of the survey, the Seattle Times says it was "the largest such study of computer use" and is therefore "likely to be cited and studied by policymakers, corporations, and others trying to understand how people interact with technology."

    In yet two more surveys, cited in CyberAtlas, one market research group says 27 million women are online in the US and another says the number of women users will surpass that of men in the near future (60% to 40% by 2002). Please see the report for details. And final survey, by CBS MarketWatch and cited in Editor & Publisher's WebTrendWatch, about half of all Americans are not online, and most of these unconnected folk prefer to remain so.

  3. Free encyclopedia

    Encyclopedia Brittanica announced this week that it would put all its content - plus news media material - on the Web for free. According to Tuesday's CBS MarketWatch, the subscription service it already has on the Web will now focus on the education market, offering additional "premium content" in exchange for the subscriber fee. The MarketWatch report offers an explanation. Here's a Reuters story on the subject, via Wired News.

  4. Distance learning: The high school version

    The state of Kentucky has joined the distance-learning experiment. According to the New York Times, the state's Education Department is offering Web for-credit courses (including advanced placement ones) that fill in gaps in what individual high schools can offer their students. Florida's doing it, too, with courses that fulfill more basic high-school requirements. Florida aims to offer a full high-school education online.

    And, just for fun read a column in the Times about how the proverbial Internet startup in a garage may soon become the proverbial Internet startup in a dorm room. As we did, you'll probably enjoy "meeting" college juniors Ben Nobel and Adam Menzel.

  5. Home networking update

    Home-networking (connecting multiple computers, printer, game consoles, and appliances over a phone line) may still be an early-adopter kind of thing, but indications are it's going mainstream pretty fast in the US. To illustrate: A power company in Texas with 6 million customers plans to expand into Internet and cable access, as well as home-networking services, according to News.com. The article also cites some market research that says US networked homes "will mushroom from 650,000 in 1999 to 10 million by 2003."

  6. Net restrictions: Thumbs up

    Most Americans "eagerly support" government restrictions on TV and the Internet. The news broke this week, but the survey seems very old. Down at the bottom of a Wired News report on the phone survey of 1,001 adults, Wired says the survey was conducted in February and March of 1998 for the Freedom Forum (a media think tank in the DC area) by the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis. The survey found that "about 58% of adults polled believe that public libraries should block access to Web sites that might offend some patrons, and the US government should develop a system to rate information online." The question is, are these findings based on ignorance (way back in the spring of '98) of what this pretty unregulated medium is like, or feelings about what all public media should look like? What do you think? Do email us, via feedback@netfamilynews.org. Then read on, for examples of how the medium can be "regulated" in individual homes and school systems….

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Online safety: Two upbeat approaches

David Smith, CEO of SurfMonkey.com, Inc., and Robert Maynard, CEO of Dotsafe, Inc., have something in common. They and their companies are both taking upbeat, creative approaches to keeping kids safe online. And we think the two companies represent the standard to beat in their respective businesses. We interviewed them both this past week because, when we covered their news earlier this month, we promised you we'd take a more in-depth look at their safety features and give you a report. (Surf Monkey announced its new Kids Channel and Surf Monkey Bar, and Dotsafe announced its offer to filter all US schools' Internet access for free.)

  1. Surf Monkey safety

    Surf Monkey 's aim is to be a guide, not a censor, for young cyberspace explorers. As CEO David Smith put it, "While some organizations are trying to close the Internet down for kids, our approach has been to open the Net up for them - provide a launchpad to the far corners of cybersapce, keeping them safe along the way as a guide and companion."

    He's talking about kids 2-12. Surf Monkey professes to do that by providing the two-part solution we reported on earlier: 1) a Web site that is both a safe "playground" in itself and a launchpad (via its "white list" of sites useful to kids) into the safe parts of cyberspace and 2) the Surf Monkey Bar that parents put on their home computer which adds safety technology (server- and client-based filtering) to their children's surfing experience. It's an add-on to users' existing browsers. (There will soon be a new stand-alone browser that's very small, less than 100K, David told us.)

    The way the technology works is a positive note, too: Surf Monkey decided kids didn't need to be protected from the Net behind a "firewall" - that heavy-handed approach corporations take (usually necessarily) to keep their own networks safe and secure. So in developing their solution, Surf Monkey didn't take the standard approach of many filtered Internet services, David told us. "There's no firewall or proxy server involved. We just designed our own custom server software specifically for kids and filtering. It's a much more efficient approach than our first-generation one," he added, referring to the disk-space-heavy filtering browser that customers had to download from a CD-ROM Surf Monkey sent out. By putting the filtering technology mostly on a server that all its customers connect through when they're online, the database of child-inappropriate sites can be updated constantly. (BTW, we're beginning to think that client-based filtering - a solution that only involves software on a home or school PC - will soon be a dinosaur unless it can be paid for by subscription and updated constantly through downloads from its developer's Web site. But that's another story.)

    When families use both features, Web site and Monkey Bar, every page a child downloads is filtered twice. First the server looks at whether the site the child's going to is on the Surf Monkey black list of inappropriate sites (more than 700 new sites are added to the black list daily, David told us). "That takes a fraction of a second," he said. "If the page is approved by the server, the page downloads, but before it's displayed in the browser [Microsoft's Explorer or Netscape], it's filtered on the fly," so that any text on the page containing profanity or sexual references, for example, is blocked. The categories of blocked sites are fairly standard - pornography, gangs' sites, illegal drugs, alcohol, hate, gambling, violence - those of SurfWatch, whose filtering technology Surf Monkey has licensed. Disclosure of criteria that SurfWatch uses to decide what's inappropriate for kids is in its site.

    Surf Monkey wouldn't really be a safety solution if it didn't have safe email, chat, and discussion-board areas as well. "When kids come to our site they become space pilots," David said. "With their space controllers they set up a list of cyber friends they can communicate with." They actually do this with their parents in the password-protected area, we're told. Any emails a child receives from someone not on the list is "locked" until a parent can read it and decide if her child can too. The same mechanism will work for Surf Monkey's forthcoming private chat rooms and personal bulletin boards (a child will be able to host her own chats or discussions with people on her approved buddy list). For a little over a year the company has provided "public" chat for registered Surf Monkey users only - with their parents' permission. It's monitored by human beings and is open every day for a three-hour window. Chat rules are posted up front, and anyone who breaks them gets booted!

  2. Dotsafe: First schools, then homes

    Dotsafe made a bold announcement a couple of weeks ago: Free Internet filtering for any school in the US. That got our attention! For the 89% of schools already connected, that means no change to existing Internet service - just filtering added to it, plus free email addresses for all students (like johnnysmith@mhs.dotsafe.net).

    That's an important offer in its own right (and we're wondering how other institutional filtering services, requiring fees, are going to keep up). We'll tell you why we think it'll work in a second, but first you should know that schools are not Dotsafe's primary market. Homes are. Dotsafe has put together the infrastructure it needs to provide filtered dial-up Internet service to homes nationwide for $19.95 a month (high-speed DSL service coming soon). So they're going for a very big universe.

    Now we'll tell you why we think their filtering will make sense to that large universe, particularly schools (at least, the schools that don't already have competitor N2H2). The answer in a nutshell: Their filtering philosophy. That was one of the first questions we asked Dotsafe CEO Robert Maynard, and his answer seemed to jive well with what school librarians would want: "If you don't see it in the New York Times, a news magazine, a school library, or on network news, you won't see it on the Internet," he said, referring to the Dotsafe Internet experience.

    The goal is to "civilize the Internet," Robert said, make the Net (or Dotsafe's filtered version of it) a PG-13 experience, as safe and predictable as the mass media in this country (well, generally predictable). Is Hustler magazine publicly accessible to children? No. So it's filtered. Is Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition or Victoria's Secret? Yes. They're not filtered. Bomb-making sites, suicide sites, sites with recipes for illegal drugs are filtered by Dotsafe. For public schools, the important point that emerges from all this is: no political or religious agenda.

    True, school administrators, tech coordinators, librarians, parents won't be able to customize the filtering much, but that's the idea - to keep the filtering criteria so simple and transparent that they won't need to. And Robert says his research shows that they don't want to. People just want peace of mind without having to learn any new technology (kids are a different story!).

    Blocking Web sites, however, is the easy part, Robert told us. The hard part, the one they're working on right now, is making online chat safe for kids. Schools generally don't allow chat. Dotsafe says research says schools generally use the Net for two things right now: primarily to teach Internet skills, secondarily for students to do research. So chat isn't part of the free service Dotsafe offers schools. But it's definitely part of the home market, the revenue-producing side of the business.

    What Dotsafe is doing right now for chat is letting its customers go to safe chat for kids, such as FreeZone, Headbone Zone, and i-SAFE, as well as Yahoo! chat. Since Yahoo! chat is definitely not always safe, Dotsafe says, it has a screen, warning of potential danger, that pops up whenever a customer clicks into Yahoo! chat.

    That's the stopgap measure, we're told. In beta-testing right now is technology that will be "listening on all ports," looking for dangerous situations, or key words and strings of data (such as a child's phone number) indicating danger in customers' chat sessions. The technology will "whisper" into a customer's ear (via instant messaging) that s/he is getting into a situation that isn't safe. It will also block profanity and sexual material in real time (though, Dotsafe says, this can't be fool-proof). The company also plans to create its own chat environments where chat will be monitored by people all the time, 7x24.

    Then there's email. That will be filtered too. Dotsafe says it will block "porn spam," sex-related unsolicited email, as well as regular email containing inappropriate language and attachments over a certain size. Filtered instant messaging is due to be added by sometime in the spring.

    Coming back around to why this is a new benchmark for Internet filtering…. Whenever you have filtering, behind it you have somebody's filtering criteria. Those criteria for what gets filtered come from somebody's value system - usually that of the filtering company or some generally accepted set of standards it adopted. Anybody who buys that product or service should probably find out what the criteria are to see if they fit the values of their family, school district, or library system. If the criteria are stated right up front to be those of what's generally acceptable in the US's public media for presentation to children, filtering customers won't have a lot of digging or customizing to do. Now, those criteria certainly won't be acceptable to everyone - for more conservative families there are a number of filtered ISPs to check out (keep reading). But public institutions that serve children may be a step closer to resolving the widely publicized conflict between filtering and free speech on the Internet. We'll now turn this over to the debaters of that tricky issue!

    Meanwhile, though there's still no getting around the need for hands-on online-parenting, good companies and technology are making it easier for us. But what do you think about filtering for kids, and what are you looking for in a filtering product or service? Do email us your thoughts - via feedback@netfamilynews.org. (For inspiration, see subscriber Jennifer's thinking on this below in "A subscriber writes.")

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This just in!

As for the latest news on filtered ISPs, two new Catholic services - Catholic Families Network and Catholic Online - were written up in the New York Times this week. The article also mentions The Koshernet. For more filtered services on the conservative side, see a list in Enough is Enough's Web site (Enough is Enough is a kids'-online-safety nonprofit organization that focuses on anti-pornography.) For a general list of filtered ISPs, see a thorough USAToday report.

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Have you gone to Google?

Students and teachers, take note: The most plain-Jane search engine on the Web launched recently, and the reviews indicate that Google's worth a try. What sets it apart is what you might call the Google "site popularity contest" - technology that ranks sites in your search return according to how popular they are to other users. That's good for general topics like "mortgages" or "books" because you'll get popular Web destinations for those categories. It's not great if you're looking for non-famous people or personal Web pages on a subject. Alta Vista's better for that.

It ranks high on Danny Sullivan's list, too. The editor of Search Engine Watch says Google turns up very relevant results. Google is listed and described in his "Major Search Engines" list. And the New York Times explains why Google's so plain-Jane. Bottom line: it's fast and it's relevant - you won't turn up quite as much "junk." Keep in mind, though: It's not G- or even PG-13-rated. Maybe that's the feature they'll roll out next.

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A new school-safety 'portal'

Parents and educators, you should know about the Net-based summit FamilyEducation.com will be holding Monday through Friday next week. Timed to the launch of their new School Safety Center, the summit's about "Violence in Schools: Keeping My Child Safe." Monday through Saturday next week parents, students, and educators will be able "to connect with experts and school and community leaders, and learn about and discuss safety issues including: tolerance and diversity, aggression and boys, drugs, gangs, harassment, and guns," according to FamilyEducation.com.

The School Safety Portal aims to be a "one-stop Web destination that offers safety news, articles, and resources from experts and leading education organizations."

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Giving online

The AOL Foundation this week unveiled what you might call a "charity portal." Helping.org is designed to make it easy for people both to give to charity and volunteer their time. It does this by aggregating (a favorite Internet word) charities and nonprofit organizations so they're easy to find, then automating the contributing process (with secure-transaction technology). Neither the AOL Foundation nor its partners in the project take any fee or commission on these giving transactions. Partners include the American Red Cross, the Digital Divide Working Group, the National Urban League, and the Benton Foundation.

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A subscriber writes

Subscriber Jennifer in Georgia wrote us this week about how she feels about filtering Internet use at home. We appreciate her view, feeling that individual families' experience is always useful for other parents to hear. Now we'd like to ask Jennifer (and all of you!) what you think about filtered Internet service that takes a fairly liberal approach (see Dotsafe above); if any of you have comments, send 'em along. Here's Jennifer:

"I have 2 daughters, aged 6 and 11. My 11 year old has done a bit of email (mostly to family) in the past but is getting more interested in being on the 'Net for school and hobbies. My husband and I are both pretty 'geeky' - we have a home network and use the internet both at home and work. We use a local ISP at home (no filter) because of the company's technical support and connectivity, rather than go through one of the big services. In my work I spend a lot of time researching technology use, education and intellectual property and privacy rights.

"I am uncomfortable with using filters (either software or filtered ISPs) because (1) it tacitly allows someone else to control the materials I access on the Internet, and because (2) I feel it is more important to teach my daughters how to make decisions and deal with these kinds of issues rather than trying to shelter them from reality. My children are never online alone - my husband or I frequently peep over their shoulders. Our Internet-active computer is located in a home office rather than in the kids' bedroom. There is no excuse for parents allowing their children to access the Internet without also being 'nosy' and checking up on them - any more than we would allow our children to sleep over at a school friend's house without first checking out the family.

"Just my 2 cents."

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