- Sites about young people's interests
Back to Rachel's love of horses. You can sub in
anything kids are passionate about, because they'll probably find a Web
site covering it. Tom's main point on this was that, when kids are deeply
interested in a Web site's subject, they're likely to be less alert to
being manipulated either by other people in the site's community areas
or by the site itself, and that can lead to problems. Rachel's favorite
site is "a virtual horse-care and -show site that's all about caring for
horses, prepping for and going to shows, winning ribbons, etc. - primarily
text-based and has chat," Tom told me. (He didn't want me to publish the
URL because he thinks it's a good site created by a well-intentioned family
that loves horses too.) "Site users have their own virtual horses. You
can establish a free account, but with a paid, premium account, you can
save all your info [track your horses' show record, ribbons won, etc.]
and have a whole stable of horses," he explained.
"Rachel got to chatting with someone on a regular
basis in the site," Tom said, someone who seemed to be an old hand at
the site's ins and outs. "One day the person told Rachel you could configure
an account to get even more out of it and convinced her to give him her
password - so he could get into Rachel's account and supposedly set it
up for her," Tom told me.
"Rachel broke our family rule - she gave out her
password," he said, "and within 10 seconds she was locked out of her own
account. The person took her account and posted it for sale."
Fortunately, they had monitoring software on her
computer, he said. "I went to the log file and pulled the conversation
[he told me he usually just looks through the log files randomly not religiously].
I emailed it to the site's sysadmin, and he called me first thing the
next business day. He'd figured out who the guy was and shut down his
account and reactivated Rachel's."
The upshot of all this, Tom said, is that one
family discussion is not enough, particularly where Web activity involving
kids' passions are concerned. They get "desensitized," he said, because
they're so focused on the subject. "Regular discussion is needed."
- 'Cross-over sites'
"Another experience we've had at our house," Tom
said, "was with what I call 'cross-over sites' - Web sites that appear
to be somewhat innocuous in their content but are really geared toward
desensitizing kids to porn and all the elements of porn sites." I'd heard
of threshold drugs, so I said, "You mean like threshold sites?"
"That's exactly it," Tom replied. "Because Rachel
and I talk on a regular basis, she never feels she has to hide anything.
So she told me about this. She was chatting with a friend on IM, and the
friend said, 'Hey, there's a site you can go to and take this survey.'
It's an 11-year-old kind of survey," Tom added, "like, 'What kind of a
friend are you?' She did the survey and she was about to send the link
to another friend to take the survey, when she noticed that also in the
list of quizzes on that page were other surveys that were sexual in nature.
They were almost buried, strategically placed. When you click on those,
you don't just get a survey but also graphics that go along with it. Sexually
explicit ones."
Rachel decided not to send the link to her friends.
"This isn't the only example I've heard of. I'm
convinced it's a method they use to get young people into this stuff,"
Tom said. "The ultimate goal is more porn customers, of course. I
think it's a trend. At least, I've have heard about it from other parents
in our circle."
- Childnet Academy '05
Spending a few days with a small group of people
representing seven continents is extraordinary in itself. But when they're
young and communicators and promoters of the best of causes and ideas,
spending time with each other can be life-changing for them and everyone
involved. I'm speaking of this year's Childnet
Academy in Jamaica last week, celebrating some of the best young Webmasters
in the world. I was inspired by the work of this year's winners, representing
seven continents, among them:
- UK 8-year-old Lalit Maganti's "Animals
in Danger," which Lalit learned how to build from borrowing a Web
site how-to book from the library.
- 14-year-old Elizabeth Clegg's "Looking
at You" for the sight-impaired (Elizabeth wrote site content from
her own experience).
- 17-year-old Nigerian Samuel Oloyede Odofin's
- "Biotechnology: The food solution,"
written in three languages (from a country greatly in need of increased
food production).
- "It's
all in the mix" by students at Northern Ireland's first religiously
integrated school, reaching out with their stories about mixing it up
in a divided community to peers in other divided communities worldwide.
- Hotline help for UK parents
At the Childnet
International conference last week, a dad from the UK
asked if there was anyone a parent could call in his country to get help
if a child was at risk online - local police didn't seem to be able to
help. Though the answer was pretty much "no" then, a BBC report the very
next day said it'll be "yes" within a year. "A unit to protect children
in the UK from Internet paedophiles is being set up by the Home Office,"
according to the
BBC. To be called the Centre for Child Protection on the Internet,
its staff of about 100 people from law enforcement and child welfare will
be open 24 hours a day. "The centre will take on work being done by the
National Crime Squad and will target those who distribute child porn images
or 'groom' children for abuse. It sound as if it will function similarly
to Cybertipline.com at the US's National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Canada's Cybertip.ca
- remarkable services that I hope parents in all countries will have access
to someday.
- Your house: A bird's-eye view at
Google
With satellite images, Google is now making it
possible for Web searchers to see at a glance how close the hotel they're
thinking of booking is to the beach, the Associated
Press reports. But there's a flipside to that convenience: Searchers
can also type in someone's address and quickly size up the neighborhood
layout. Google's new feature , stemming from its
purchase of digital mapmaker Keyhole Corp. six months ago, "will enable
its users to zoom in on homes and businesses using satellite images...
providing a bird's-eye-view of about half the United States." The Keyhole
technology provides "close-up perspective of specific addresses." A Keyhole
manager told the AP that there is little reason for paranoia about the
satellite images, though, because they're 6-12 months old.
- Tell IM-ers about new worm!
Watch out, parents of IM-ers, a nasty email-carried
worm that started going around on April Fool's Day is now pestering MSN
Messenger users. Posing as Microsoft, Trend Micro, and Symantec, the Chod.B
worm "sends out messages to contacts from the infected user's address
book, warning them that they are about to receive a file," CNET
reports. "The virus then sends a file designed to infect the recipient's
system." Tell your kids it looks like it's coming from someone on their
buddy list and "sounds" like a friend, saying, "'Check out what I just
found on the Internet." The cardinal IM rule they need to have memorized
is not to click on any file sent them, even from a "buddy" before
starting a new, separate conversation with that buddy, or screenname,
and asking him or her if s/he sent that file. (The worm grabs screennames
from people's address books on PCs it has infected in order to pose as
buddies.) For more, see CNET. As for the big picture, ZDNET
reports that the quantity of IM threats like these to PC security
"increased 250% in the first quarter of 2005."
- AOL's new blog service for teens
I'm wondering why someone hasn't come up with
this before - maybe because blogging's phenomenal growth among teenagers
took us all by surprise. Anyway, AOL just unveiled its new "RED Blogs"
(parts of its "RED" for teens). Even though teenagers often reveal their
most intimate thoughts in blogs, they're smart, AOL's research found:
84% of them "said they would not like to share their blog with just anyone
on the Web," CNET
reports. RED blogs "allows teenagers and parents to select the level
of privacy they want for their online diaries; a private blog can be kept
locked. A semiprivate blog is locked to all but those who are invited
to read it. And a public blog allows access to anybody on the Net." Another
interesting factoid: "When AOL asked teenagers in a survey who they were
more likely to share their feelings with--parents or a blog - parents
narrowly won out, 51% to 49%." For the latest on teens 'n' blogs, see
"Parents'-eye view
of blogging kids" and "A
dad on kids' blogs."
- Predator stopped in Seattle
Police arrested a 42-year-old man outside a shopping
mall when he was rendezvousing with "a 13-year-old girl" he'd been "grooming"
in online chat. "The receptive young girl never existed; detectives had
posed as her online, trading sexually explicit banter with the suspect
as part of a ruse to catch Internet pedophiles, The
Olympian reports. Tech-savvy policework like this is happening more
and more worldwide, and if I linked to all the coverage, this news service
would just be about that. So I'm linking to this short, clear-cut article
in case it's a useful discussion point for family discussions on chatting
with strangers online. In many of these stories, 13-14 is the age level
particularly vulnerable. This story points to several tactics of predators,
including their perusing and using young people's online profiles in blogs,
IM, chat, etc. (so kids need to be careful about what they reveal in them).
Police also noted two approaches these people take: quick, predatory attempts
to meet kids offline and patient "grooming," or relationship-building
using various communication modes - chat, email, IM, phone, etc. - over
weeks and sometimes months so targeted kids don't feel they're talking
to strangers. (Thanks to the National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this piece out.)
- Kid-friendly search engines
I've been waiting for this: the specialists at
SearchEngineWatch updating their survey
of child-safe search engines. The article covers major directories
of child-appropriate Web sites, grownup search engines that provide filtering,
and a bit about filtering software in general. One children's directory
they missed is Kidsnet's Hazoo.com,
which offers only child-safe Web pages actually reviewed by human beings
(Kidsnet's number was 175 million pages a year ago). For more on Kidsnet
filtering, see my write-up, 4/9/04.
Parents, you do know about filtered Web search, right? If you don't have
filtering for your family PC, this would be the most basic precaution
against kids stumbling upon online porn: Go to Google, Yahoo, MSN Search,
etc. and turn on strict filtering on their preferences pages. A family
rule to use only those filtered search engines (to keep it simple at our
house, we all just use one search engine) and not to change the preferences
would back that up. As an additional precaution, we tell our kids to use
that search engine to find sites whose URLs they're not sure about - don't
just type any old URL into your browser windeow, because of the bad
stuff you can run into. [Thanks to Marylaine Block's "Neat
New Stuff I Found This Week" for pointing out the SearchEngineWatch
update.]
- From blogging to vlogging
Teenagers will probably be interested in trying
this: video blogging, or "vlogging" - what Google just announced it's
going to start hosting. Vlogging "is still a new phenomenon but is expected
to take off as Web space becomes cheaper - or even free - and digital
cameras become ever more sophisticated," the BBC
reports. Teen bloggers, who love playing around with various media,
undoubtedly will have fun with this. But there's a downside they and grownups
need to be aware of, the same one found in moblogs (blogging with mobile
phones), podcasting (blogging with Web and iPod), and regular blogs: the
unwise way teens represent themselves with images and video, thinking
it's all just among friends (for an extreme, not a common, example, see
"Self-published
child porn"). Back to the BBC: "The move to let people upload video
to Google's servers comes as the firm trials a video search service....
Google's interest in blogging - web logging - stems back to 2003 when
it bought popular blog site, Blogger.com." BTW, in its coverage of vlogging,
The
Register reported that, in a recent survey, 23% of Britons "cited
pornography as their primary reason for getting broadband internet, far
outweighing any other factor."
- So what is phishing again?!
I've covered the phishing phenom in the past,
but according to the
BBC there are still a lot of questions out there about just
what it is, exactly. Simply put, it's online fraud - people trying to
separate you from your personal financial information, passwords, etc.
And phishers are getting more sophisticated, CNET
reports, with trickier technology (making the phony Web sites their
emails link you to look very much like the real thing) and better "social
engineering" (being trickier or more persuasive in getting you to do what
they want). It's not just about sending you to what appears to be your
bank's Web site anymore. It may be a persuasive IM to your child that
appears to be from one of their friends and tells them to download this
cool photo or that awesome song or click to this online body-rating site.
[This page at CNET has a helpful sidebar, "Many
types of phishers in the sea."] Phishing requires increasing alertness
on the part of both parents and kids - ideally a family discussion about
careful downloading and clicking. There are also tech tools to help, for
example FraudEliminator (see my 12/17/04
issue), and Internet service providers are increasingly providing
tools to protect their customers.
- Animal hunting as a video game?
California is considering a law to ban what one
state legislator calls "video target practice using live animals," the
Associated
Press reports. People in the state actually run "computer-assisted
hunting sites." "It's a response to a Texas ranch that says it is setting
up a system that would allow people to shoot at live game via the Internet,"
according to the AP. State Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach) called it
"pay-per-view video game using live animals for target practice." Pro-hunting
groups themselves are calling it unethical and unsporting. We can only
hope that young Web surfers and gamers haven't found or used such "services,"
thinking they were legitimate or "just a game."
- Trouble for online cigarette sales
This is timely for the Tobacco-Free Kids Campaign's
10th-annual "Kick Butts Day," April 13: "Two weeks after credit card companies
announced they would no longer accept payment for tobacco products bought
online, scores of Internet cigarette merchants have effectively lost the
means to do business profitably," the New
York Times reports. They are "either limping along or have shut down
their operations altogether." Kick Butts Day is when "thousands of young
people are expected to speak out against tobacco use," according to ConnectforKids.org's
latest newsletter. "The initiative empowers young people to become leaders
in stopping tobacco use." Connect for Kids cites figures from the Campaign
for Tobacco-Free Kids showing that "more than 2,000 children and teens
become addicted to tobacco every day, one-third of whom will die
prematurely." The Times cites the 2004 online cigarette sales figure to
have been $1 billion. The US federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
says online merchants "had not done enough to comply with age verification
practices," among other requirements, according to the Times.
- Mobile Net, mobile porn
Everything that our children can be exposed to
on the Web will soon be on cell phones. A lot already is. CNET
columnist Molly Wood does a great job of laying out the not-so-pretty
mobile-phone picture today. What "bigger screens, higher resolution, more
colors, and video capability" mean in this context, that mobile porn will
be a $5 billion industry by 2010, and that the US market for this content
is only playing catch-up to what's happening in Europe, Asia, and South
America. Some countermeasures are in the works - see "Filtering
phones."
But phones aren't the all of the "mobile Internet,"
as my colleagues at Childnet International
put it. The mobile Net is enabled by the "wi-fi hot spots" proliferating
throughout the world - places where anyone can connect wirelessly with
anything from a cellphone to a game player to a "walkie talkie"). What
24x7 connecting capability means to families is less and less parental
control over young people's access. This puts the onus on all of us -
parents and kids - to work harder at developing the most effective filter
there will ever be: the one that lies between children's ears, as SafeKids.com's
Larry Magid first put it in an online-safety seminar years ago. Their
own critical thinking and media literacy will be children's best protection,
along with engaged parenting. The Digital Age calls for a solid parent-child
partnership: They can help us with their tech literacy and we can help
them with our life literacy, and that's a tremendous opportunity for parent-child
communication and mutual respect. For more detail on what the mobile Internet
looks like, see DailyBulletin.com.
- P2P & new copyright thinking
Hip-hop is a great example of music that's so
Digital Age, the Christian
Science Monitor points out in a thorough think piece on all Net-based
music's shades of gray. "The Internet hasn't only made copying easy, it
also has helped foster a culture in which some artists create new work
by literally reusing or remixing the work of others. Hip-hop music, built
on the idea of 'sampling' the beats or sounds of earlier music, is the
most obvious of several examples," the Monitor reports. It creatively
pulls together "found [musical] objects of other cultural products," it
quotes one expert as saying. Which seems to require a new approach to
copyright - the reason why there's so much controversy and litigation
over traditional copyright models. Some companies are finding some middle
ground, for example, Magnatune.com. That was John Buckman's idea in 2003
when he founded Magnatune.com - "an independent record label that sells
music through online downloads and CDs and also licenses music for both
commercial and noncommercial use," according to the monitor. Its business
plan: "Let people listen to the music all they want for free over the
Internet. If they like an album so much they want to own it, they can
pay a range of prices from $5 to $18 per album, which they can choose."
Most customers pay $8.20/album on average. Half goes to the musician (much
more than conventional record labels pay. [Last week the US Supreme Court
heard arguments on both sides of the P2P debate - see CNET.
A decision is expected in June.]
- Copyright law & our kids
Our children - whether they're listeners, downloaders,
composers, or digital-music mashers - are affected by the copyright-law
decisions being made these days, including the one the US Supreme Court
is expected to announce in June. "When people are willing to line up for
nearly 24 hours to hear a copyright case, something far bigger than accessing
free music is taking place," writes Internet law specialist Michael Geist
in the Toronto
Star. "That something is a dramatic shift in the production and distribution
of creative work by millions of individuals who are both creators and
users and now see copyright reform as relevant to them. The success of
future reform depends upon recognizing this evolution and ensuring that
reform processes properly accommodate the largely unrepresented constituency."
Children, parents, educators, artists, entertainment companies, tech innovators
- everyone who works with intellectual property, which is basically all
of humanity - has a stake in this debate. And it's wonderful fuel for
family discussion and helping our children develop critical thinking and
moral reasoning. See also "Bigger picture on file-sharing," 1/30/04.
Thanks to Michael Geist for zooming in on its importance.
