April 30, 2004
Dear Subscribers:
Here's our lineup for this last week of April:
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A subscriber writes:
Kids checking out porn with image searches
It's not easy being caught off-balance by one's tech-literate
child - even less so to share the experience with a lot of other parents.
So we appreciated subscriber Cindy's candor when she emailed us last week:
"I have discovered kids at school using Yahoo to find
pornographic pictures," Cindy emailed us from Ohio. She said her 6th-grader
had learned how simple it is to type words such as "cheerleaders" or "slutz"
in Yahoo's image search engine (clicking on "Images" above the search
box) and get porn photos - it's "a misuse of a Web site that is often
used for school projects," Cindy wrote.
"I went on Yahoo myself and plugged the words in and
was, of course, totally offended and shocked at what I saw on the screen,"
she said. "These pictures were beyond Playboy!"
When she talked this over with her son, Cindy wrote,
"he told me that many kids know how to do this, and that they are actively
doing it as young as 3rd and 4th grade (on up into junior high). It started
by one older child ... who learned from his single uncle (in his 30s), who
then went and showed a younger child (a friend) and so on and on."
Her son told her the children access this adult content
"as often as once a week or more. Yahoo.com has been a search engine that
the teachers have recommended for school projects and reports (in addition
to Google, etc.).
"It is way more prevalent than I even imagined!" Cindy
said. "I didn't know it was going on in elementary school! There is a lot
of peer pressure to 'like it' and to be 'into it' for these boys. For this
age level, I don't see it as just a 'boys will be boys' mentality. Porn is
porn....
"These are children of parents I know and respect,"
she continued. "Of course I was shocked and felt very naïve. I am a former
school psychologist and currently work as a substitute teacher at my children's
(K-8) school, so I felt like I was a 'mom on top of things.' I got totally
knocked off, obviously. We don't even have cable TV, as a major way of keeping
the junk out of the house.... Needless to say, I tightened up the parental
controls on my children's Web use and started searching the Net for more info
about computer safety."
We're surprised teachers or administrators in Cindy's
child's school don't require filtered searching (maybe they do and kids disable
it when their Net use isn't being monitored). We replied to Cindy's email
about the following but wonder how many of you know that in a number of search
engines (Yahoo, Google, Lycos, AltaVista, etc.), you can click on "Preferences"
or "Advanced Search" and turn filtering on. It will remain on, on that computer,
even if you log off the Net or shut the PC down, until someone changes the
setting. Google and Yahoo, which both call theirs "SafeSearch," have three
levels of filtering - strict, moderate, and none. At our house (this may not
work as well at school), we have filtering turned on in all these search engines,
including the new Mamma.com (click on "Power
Search," check "Adult Content Reduction," and then click "Save Settings"),
and we also have a family rule that no one disables filters. So far, nothing
"nasty," as our 12-year-old would put it, has come up in search results.
Anyway, here's part of our response to Cindy: You
are certainly not alone in feeling naive - our guess is, many, many parents
are either in the dark or in denial about what their kids are exposed to on
the Net. That's not to say we think the Net is bad - it's good and bad, depending
on how it's used, and so ubiquitous in kids' lives now that its use has necessarily
become a vital parenting issue - both burden and opportunity for parents in
terms of family communication and mutual respect.
Cindy replied: "Thank you so much for responding....
I want to share - within appropriate age limits of course - the negative aspects
of porn with my child as a 'home lesson.' Since he knows about porn, he needs
to learn about the dangers and the 'sickness' of it in an age-appropriate
way, just like our family and the schools teach about drugs (DARE program),
alcohol, etc. No one yet has taught about the dangers of porn (i.e. schools
in Ohio)...."
She raises an interesting question about how to teach
children that the pornographic content so many of them are exposed to on the
Web (we had not before heard that elementary schoolchildren were viewing porn
as "cool," the way kids in our generation secretly smoked cigarettes to be
seen as cool) can present a distorted picture of sexuality or negatively affect
their own sexual development. We will leave this important question on the
table for the psychologists and child-development experts among us. [For some
findings on this in the US and Australia, see "Online kids' exposure to porn:
2 studies in 2 countries," 3/7/03.]
Please email us your views and comments anytime - via feedback@netfamilynews.org!
BTW, an important thing to keep in mind in all this
is not to overreact. Besides the age-old reverse psychology reason, there's
the new Net-related one: The Internet (or kids' favorite aspects of it - instant-messaging,
blogs/journaling, etc.) is so important to many teens' social standing now
that - if parents overreact and threaten to unplug the Net - kids will "go
underground" with these activities before they'll tell a parent about anything
negative that's occurred online. We need to keep those lines of communication
open, so we can know at least a little of their online experiences, especially
if something difficult comes up. Do email us if you'd like documentation of
this.
* *
Related news: How good are those search
filters?
Search engine filtering is just as flawed as all other
filters, apparently. But in Google's case, it seems to be flawed in a conservative
way, blocking more than users feel it should. "Despite claims of 'advanced
proprietary technology,' Google's opt-in porn filter proves no better than
the tools of the last decade, blocking many harmless sites, CNET reports. Turns out, Google's SafeSearch blocks sites like
the auto parts retailer PartsExpress.com because the word "sex" is embedded
in the URL and children's clothing seller ALittleGirlsBoutique.com because
of the word "girls" in that domain name. Google says its filter users (it
won't give out their numbers) "are mostly ok with" the filter "being on the
conservative side."
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- Voices of reason on Gmail
Remember the big flap over Google's free Gmail
idea that we mentioned
a few weeks ago? We were never clear on why privacy advocates were
making such a big deal about Gmail, but CNET columnist Declan McCullagh explains it in a nutshell by
calling the most vocal anti-Gmail camp "privacy fundamentalists." It's
becoming clearer (this latest
CNET report indicates there's some conspiracy theorizing going on
at the Electronic Privacy Information Center).
Then we ran across Tim O'Reilly's level-headedness in this
column of his. Tim simply says all the fuss about Gmail and privacy
is "bogus" and gives nine reasons why. Turns out he's as intrigued as
we are with the big picture Gmail points to - the giant distributed operating
system that Google represents with its 100,000 Web servers and what it
means to us users, as expressed by Rich
Skrenta and Jason
Kottke.
- Google goes public
What makes all this especially interesting, not
just to people who follow the tech industry, is Google's $2.7 billion
IPO this week. To some, Google's going public means the tech upturn is
for real now. To others it's kind of sad, spelling the change of culture
for a young company led by young people involved more in a "scientific
quest" than a business venture, the Christian
Science Monitor reports - a quest to find "new ways to bring more
information instantly," to stay on top of the info flood we're all faced
with. Founders and "reluctant billionaires" Larry Page and Sergey Brin
don't want to hand control of that important experiment over to Wall Street
(a Depression-era federal law, not the need for capital, is what drove
the IPO). The unusually designed IPO reflects that wish. Here's CNET's
coverage.
- More student file-sharers sued
The April round of RIAA lawsuits against online
music file-sharers was announced this week. This time the recording industry
trade association is suing 477 file- swappers at 14 universities around
the US, CNET reports.
The lawsuits were filed against anonymous individuals whose identities
will emerge in court proceedings, CNET adds. They bring the total to 2,454
sued since last summer, the Associated
Press reports. "None of the [2,454] has yet gone to trial, and 437
people so far have agreed to pay financial penalties of about $3,000 as
settlements." CNET refers to a Pew Internet & American Life finding this
week that 14% of US Net users no longer download music from "unauthorized"
P2P services. A third, about 6 million people, attributed their decision
in part to RIAA litigation. "However, the study also said that the number
of people who actively download music from peer- to-peer networks has
increased to 23 million from 18 million in November and December of last
year." Here's the Pew
study.
Meanwhile, talk about work-arounds: There's a
new file-sharing service on Internet2 called i2hub.com that's already
extremely popular among students, CNET
reports. Internet2 is the other Internet with extremely fat
pipes (very broadband) used by universities and researchers, according
to this article devoted to it at Webmonkey.
"It uses an entirely different infrastructure than the public Internet
we know and love/hate today." Hmmm, a new target for the RIAA?
- Cheaper music from Russia
Cheap, not free. This may turn out to become popular
among digital music fans at your house. We have a sneaking feeling the
RIAA (or any record company or pay- per-tune online service anywhere)
won't like it, but it seems on the up-and-up (for now), depending on the
judgment of Sydney
Morning Herald writer/music fan Charles Wright. He downloaded 968
tracks, or 56 albums, by artists as varied as Miles Davis, Norah Jones,
and the Beatles for $48.65 US - what would normally cost $958 US at iTunes
or anyplace chargine 99 cents a tune. How did he do that? He went to a
Russian site called allofmp3.com. "There is no indication in our dealings
with allofmp3.com over several weeks that this is one of those dubious
enterprises so much loved by the Russian mafia," Wright writes. No credit
card problems, and while we have no legal qualifications, we can't see
that it fails to comply with the Berne Convention on copyright. The site
claims to pay licensing fees for all the music on it and says "all the
materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution
via Internet, according to Licence # LS-3M-02-36 of the Russian Multimedia
and Internet Society." Of course there's a disclaimer that, when users
click on their terms of service, they're agreeing not to use allofmp3.com
"if it is in conflict with legislation of your country." (Our thanks to
BNA Internet Law for this heads-up.)
- iTunes a year old
Not the 100 million it projected, but iTunes sold
70 million songs by its first birthday this week, CNET
reports. Apple now has licensing arrangements with the five major
record labels and offers music from more than 450 independent labels,
and these deals add up to 700,000 songs on iTunes. To celebrate, iTunes
has a half-dozen new features, including iMix (with which customers can
publish their playlists for friends to preview, rate, and buy), Party
Shuffle (random song selection from one's collection), and a feature that
lets you design and print their own album art - a jewel case insert for
a CD you burn. Also, "it is now possible to share iTunes songs among five
personal computers instead of three. But the number of times a particular
playlist can be burned on a CD has been reduced from 10 times to 7," and
a file-swapping feature has been deleted. Here's Wired
News's coverage.
- Bowie: Go ahead and bootleg!
Musician David Bowie is actually inviting
people to bootleg his music, and offering prizes for the most creative
theft," the Associated Press reports. His Web site "invites fans to mix classic
Bowie songs with material from his latest album, 'Reality,' to create
a 'mash-up' - a track superimposing the vocal line from one song with
the backing tracks from another." Tracks from his new album and the mixing
software can be downloaded from DavidBowie.com. The mash-up technique,
which - like many digital-music fans these days - Bowie himself has had
fun with through the years, "gained prominence with 'The Grey Album,'
a blend of The Beatles and Jay-Z by US DJ Danger Mouse. A reported 1 million
copies were downloaded from the Internet before it was blocked by record
company EMI in February" (see "24-hour file-sharing protest" in our 2/27
issue).
- New IM war
AOL's ICQ now offers games, MSN Messenger gets
games next week, and "The All New Yahoo Messenger" is one of that software
program's "most dramatic makeovers to date," CNET
reports. In all three now, IM-ers can display and share photos and
play games in IM chat windows. But another feature Yahoo has that we think
will be popular with kids is "the option of displaying avatars, which
are cartoon images that people can customize with different appearances,
outfits, and backgrounds to reflect their moods." It's a step up from
the skins (e.g., screen colors) and personal icons already hugely popular
among young users. Here's CNET on ICQ
(with birthday alerts and message- forwarding to cell phones) and MSN Messenger (with its "Instant Games Clubhouse"). A caveat
for parents: each of IM's features - text, audio, photos, etc. - has its
own port, or door to the public Internet. If your firewall allows that
IM program, it allows all those doors to remain wide open. Go through
the IM program's Preferences with your child and decide together what's
necessary (for more, see "Instant-messaging risks & tips" in our 1/9/04
issue).
- New global anti-child-porn campaign
The International Centre for Missing & Exploited
Children is stepping up police work aimed at fighting online child pornography,
Internet
News reports. With a just-launched $1 million campaign funded by Microsoft
and philanthropist Sheila S. Johnson, the Centre is providing law-enforcement
officers worldwide with tech training. Accurate figures on the online
circulation of child pornography are hard to come by, but one measurement
is the number of reports to child-porn hotlines around the world. "The
International Centre says it received more than 200,000 reports of 'Internet-related
child pornography' during 2003, although there is no breakdown of those
numbers as to whether a crime was actually committed."
- SC tougher on Net predators
South Carolina just joined 29 other states in
making it illegal to stalk, lure, or entice a child for abduction or sexual
assault, the Associated
Press reports. What this means is that prosecution can now happen
before an assault or meeting has taken place, according to the
AP. "The law mandates a 10-year sentence for each offense, which Attorney
General Henry McMaster said can multiply if there are several online contacts
before an arrest." (Our thanks to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this out.)
- Wireless keypads in class
They look like TV remotes, and teachers say they
help students "feel a connection to the subject" being discussed in class,
the New
York Times reports. They're small wireless keypads linked to a computer.
"Students answer questions not by raising their hands but by punching
buttons, with the results appearing on a screen in the front of the room."
But beyond engaging students, what's really interesting about this article
is the story it tells about how the device enables one professor to turn
her class into a sociological lab and show her 400 students how to do
sociology themselves, instantly. Meanwhile, 100 teachers from 45 countries
met in Europe this week to share ideas on the best ways to use technology
in the classroom, the BBC
reports.
- Teacher's-eye-view of blogs
Kids may love to create them more for social purposes,
but blogs can have educational value too. Witness this helpfully elementary
article on blogs at TechLearning.com
that explains what blogs are, then links you to blogs by educators, for
educators, and about education - as well as blogs, such as SchoolBlogs.com,
that teach you how to set up blogs!
- Chatnannies update
Innovation or fabrication? "Chatnannies" - automated
software "bots" that "visit" online chatrooms and catch pedophiles chatting
with children - got a lot of media coverage a couple of months ago. Now
the technology's getting coverage questioning its authenticity "since
[the technology] was more than 10 years ahead of all other artificial
intelligence technology, and no one is allowed to see it in the flesh,"
according to The
Guardian. A separate
Guardian article reports that UK children's charities are concerned
that Chatnannies, which is also a Web site, encourages vigilantism and
"puts children in danger." The site recruits people to work as "chatnannies"
in kids' chatrooms for young people but does not screen these recruits
to see if they're qualified to look after children. Our thanks to QuickLinks
for pointing this news out.
* * * *
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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor
Net Family News
