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Welcome to the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and thanks to everyone who's just subscribed! Be sure to put our return address (anne@netfamilynews.org) on your ISP's allow or white list so its filters won't block the newsletter. And email me anytime!

 

May 13, 2005

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this second week of May:


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Over-the-transom resources for online families

I get lots of email from makers and publishers of resources for parents, and here are the highlights. I can't endorse products and software because Net Family News doesn't have the resources to test them properly, but I do these occasional roundups in case there's something you've been looking for here. As for Web sites, I do check out every one - and only pass along the ones I feel are worth parents' attention.

  1. Software

    • P2P parental controls. Some parents uneasy about file-sharing don't even know if there is P2P software on the family PC (they are not alone!). Blockster, from SMARTguard Software, figures it out for them. It monitors and blocks file-sharing software, giving parents an unhackable override password for all such programs on the system - those that allow the transfer, or sharing, of files from that PC, including IRC chat.

    • Controlling gameplay. WallFly, SMARTguard Software's newest product, controls more than game play on the computer - it also detects games and allows parents to monitor, restrict or ban computer use as well as game playing (with an "account" for each child), the company says. WallFly "knows" computer games' ratings (designated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB.org) and restricts play, based on how parents configure it for each child. If a parent says no M-rated games for the 13-year-old, for example, WallFly will block those. Note, this is for computer not console games. When I asked SMARTguard about this, they said they're moving toward other platforms, but PCs were the best place to start because console games are "less of a problem, as they tend to be less immersive and generally in the family room, where obsessive gaming is a little bit harder to pull off."

    • PC time controls. Are we seeing a trend in ever-more-specialized family-computer software? I think so. Another very specific parental-control product is ComputerTime. Looks like it's just right for parents who are tired of telling IM-ers, gamers, etc., to get off the computer and do their homework, chores, etc.! With this simple program, its makers say, parents can schedule time (of day, week, etc.) on the computer for each child. I'm thinking: Session limits such as an hour a day per child can really cut down on arguments over who gets to go online and for how long!

    • CyberPatrol 7.0 was recently unveiled, updating this all-purpose parental-control software with new features, including phishing and spyware protection, "real-time monitoring and logging" of online activities, and controls for file-sharing and other programs kids use to download media and software from the Web, its makers at SurfControl say. The fee is $40/year for multiple family members' individual accounts (with a 14-day free trial). For more info, check out Software4Parents.com.

    • FraudEliminator for Firefox too. If your family has made the browser switch, the free FraudEliminator toolbar for protection against phishing and pharming is now available for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. It can be downloaded at the company's Web site. Attacking the problem in a different way is Anonymizer's Anonymous Surfing, for $29.99/year. For more information on phishing, see my 12/17/04 issue, and for a great explanation of the new pharming scam, see the Christian Science Monitor, plus coverage at USATODAY. [The Washington Post reported this week that 43% of adults have received a phishing email and 5% of those gave up personal information.]

    • CallWave is PC software that helps people get more from the phones they already have - cell and landline. It'll send text call alerts to your cellphone (in case a child forgets to tell you who called the house); forward home calls to your cell phone; let you listen to a message on your cell phone as it's being left, then - if you want to take the call - you can push a button to catch the caller; let you listen to messages on your PC speakers if your child's on the phone. It's what Entrepreneur.com calls a new wave of "premium phone services [available a la carte] ... at pretty reasonable monthly rates."

  2. Book blog, extreme videos, school info, kid stuff....

    • "Maximum Ride" now surfs. The 14-year-old hero now stars in a blog as well as the book bearing her name. She's the creation of best-selling author James Patterson, and Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment is his first book for young adults. It's a sci-fi thriller (Max and her five "siblings" are 98% human and 2% bird) targeting readers 10-18, but its publishers (Little Brown) are banking on a lot of adult Patterson fans enjoying it too. What's different about this project is the blog and discussion board, encouraging readers to post, write fanfiction, and otherwise interact with the book and its characters. Frankly, I can't imagine a book for teens without a companion online community.

    • One family's "tech makeover" and other articles make for a great up-to-the-minute family resource. I'm referring to the Washington Post's spring 2005 guide to personal technology. Click on one of the graphical house's windows for topics, including a video tutorial on securing the family PC, ISP comparison shopping, digital photo tips, and gadget gift ideas for graduates. Here's the full list of articles.

    • Niche sports videos online. If you have mountain bikers, skateboarders, or surfers at your house, chances are they love watching obscure, hard-to-get videos of their favorite pros. Karl Quist - the founder of TotalVid, a specialty video start-up and Web site - told CNET he used to drive his wife crazy watching favorite videos 1,000 times. "TotalVid offers more than 1,000 titles, which cost up to $4 and expire after seven days.... Consumers can also purchase a DVD and permanent digital version of a movie and have the rental cost subtracted from the DVD buy," CNET reports. I have a feeling this site will soon be bookmarked on computers at our house.

    • SchoolMatters.com is a new service by Standard & Poor's designed to give "policymakers, educators, and parents the tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student performance." It contains a fund of publicly available education data gathered into one place, state by state - e.g., number of students in a state, number of schools and districts, spending per student, tax allocations, demographics, test performance, staffing distribution, ed officials, contacts, etc.

    • Families in touch. Talk2theFamily.com, based in the UK, is a safe, non-technical way for far-flung extended families to stay on top of everything - with home page, calendar, family members' own Web sites, news, chat, photo album, file exchange, address book, etc. (all available only to member who have the password). Families of 10 can use it for 9.95 pounds/year (about $18), 19.95 for families of 30 (about $38).

    • Family scheduling. MemoText is for families that use cellphones with texting capability (90% of phone now have it). You schedule reminders in the family's personal calendar at the MemoText passworded Web site; reminders are automatically sent at the appropriate time to members' text-enabled cellphones. $4.99 gets you 50 reminders/month (basic fee).

    • For little 'puter users. KidzMouse "mice" and keyboards are sized and designed for the littlest clickers and tappers. Disney and other media companies have also put their brands on KidzMouse products - e.g., the Mickey keyboard for about $30.

    • 'BlackBerry' for kids. If grownups can have BlackBerrys, this electronics firm's logic goes, "why can't kids have BlueBerrys, GreyBerrys, Grapeberrys and StrawBerrys?" Sakar International has created a palmtop organizer for 10-to-14-year-olds that doubles as a phone (a landline one they have to plug into the phone jack). The $19.99 device, which can be found at Wal-Mart, can store "dozens of phone numbers, email addresses, and important dates from school events to sleepovers" and has password protection.

    • Two mega Web destinations - one for kids 9-14 (KidzWorld.com), one for whole families (Kaboose.com). KidzWorld has just about any feature of interest to tweens: entertainment news, contests, quizzes, games, travel, and -most important - community (chat is monitored and all discussion-board posts previewed, KidzWorld says). Kaboose claims to be the "fastest-growing online destination for families and kids," at 6 million visitors a month. It does indeed have content for all ages, from a searchable database of 500,000 "hand-picked, family-friendly" Web sites to games and Funschool for kids to recipes and family-travel spots for parents. There are discussion boards too, all moderated, Kaboose Network says.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Long-awaited filter reviews

    Now that more than half of US families with teenagers use filtering software (see 3/18), it's surprising how seldom Consumer Reports tests filters - the last time was four years ago. But software testing's very involved, and it's great when they do apply their solid methodology to this important product category. There are four basic take-aways from CR's latest review: 1) Filtering software has gotten better but is still flawed, 2) the 11 products tested are "very good or excellent" at blocking porn (the worst product blocked 88%), 3) "they blocked more than porn but not effectively" (not great at blocking hate and violence sites or those that aided weapons-making or advocated illegal drug use), and 4) they over-blocked ("the best porn blockers were heavy-handed against sites about health issues, sex education, civil rights, and politics"). CR's top 3 picks were SafeBrowse "for most people," AOL's Parental Controls "for Mac users or families with young children," and Microsoft's Parental Controls "if you use MSN or want protection built into your Internet service." But the overview also had good things to say about KidsNet for ease of use and porn-blocking effectiveness (though it overblocked a bit too). Here's the page with at-a-glance ratings of the 11 products reviewed.

  2. 16-year-old arrested in Net-security case

    Swedish police have detained a teenager in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, in connection with the theft of Cisco Systems software code last year, Reuters reports. The network security breach and stolen were "part of a more extensive operation ... in which thousands of computer systems were similarly penetrated," the New York Times earlier reported. Computer-security and US federal investigators only recently "acknowledged that the Cisco break-in was only part of a more extensive operation involving a single intruder or a small band, apparently based in Europe." The Wall Street Journal reports that "the stolen code was a portion of the operating system for Cisco's routers, which direct most of the traffic across the Internet." To parents it might be notable that the nearly year-long investigation, involving Net-connected computers at in seven countries, "is being treated as a juvenile case."

  3. Next Xbox's big party

    It's not on store shelves yet but, watch out gamer parents and parents of gamers, Xbox 360's marketing has already started - its Hollywood premier party aired last night as a prime-time special on MTV. One of the interesting things about it is the many ways gamers will be able to customize it - its hardware, the look of the screen, and games' background music (without losing their all-important sound effects), MTV reports. Also compelling will be the community aspects - four controllers can be plugged in at once - and, "through Xbox Live, 64 players from around the world will be able to compete against each other in the same game." Parents may want to note this example of how game consoles are getting closer and closer to being connected computers, with the accompanying online-safety and PC security implications (console games, ideally, will need to be in high-traffic parts of the house too). Gamers will appreciate this insider's view of Xbox 360's development at GameSpot.com. It goes on sale in a number of countries next fall. Many other products will be unveiled next week at the giant "E3" games expo.

  4. Yahoo tunes up: New service

    Yahoo Music Unlimited is being unveiled today, the Wall Street Journal reports - the beta version, anyway. Using the rent-a-tune model, it undercuts pricing at, e.g., MSN, iTunes, and Real, but it offers fewer choices than Real's latest offering (see my 4/29 issue). Songs can be transferred onto select MP3 players but become unplayable once a subscription lapses. The service gives subscribers "unlimited access to over a million music tracks for $6.99 a month, or, alternatively, for $60 a year" (Real's is $179/year). The latest CNET coverage suggests a possible price war. Besides pricing, what will probably be attractive to young music fans: the community part. Yahoo "has spent considerable time building links to its ... popular instant-messaging application, with the aim of making community and legal music-sharing among subscribers a core part of the service," CNET reported earlier. And the service will also "allow subscribers to see what songs friends have on their computers, and listen to their friends' tracks if the tracks are part of Yahoo's catalog. Rival services let users share music playlists, but individuals can't always hear the songs unless they own them," the Journal. Here's Walt Mossberg's comparison of Real's and Yahoo's services and the best explanation I've seen yet of renting vs. owning tunes.

  5. Calling young programmers!

    I've been following Tom Friedman's writing about this flat world of ours for some time as a separate interest from kid-tech news, but there's a point of intersection in his latest New York Times column that parents of tech-literate kids might want to see. Tom quotes a CNET commentary: "The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest ... the lowest ranking for the top-performing US school in the 29-year history of the competition." A Chinese university took top honors, followed by Moscow State and the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics. David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, said that, though the US "used to dominate these kinds of programming Olympics," it hasn't won a world championship since 1997. Bill Gates has been making a similar point when speaking about US education in various locations, as have other tech executives. This spells opportunity for aspiring programmers and other technologists. Many of our children have never known life without the Internet - a whole generation of Americans soon to add their vision and skills to global competitions and the amazing innovation going on in Russia, India, China, and so many other countries that Tom says are now competing on a level playing field.

  6. P2P as future game base

    Besides the fact that file-sharing has surpassed Web use in bandwidth ("space" in Internet pipes) used, here's another sign that P2P technology is here to stay: peer-to-peer gaming. It's an experiment in its early stages, CNET reports, but the Solipsis project/game "aims to draw together the technological lessons of 'massively multiplayer' games like Sony's 'EverQuest' and file-swapping networks like Kazaa or eDonkey. Developers are hoping to construct a sprawling virtual world that runs on its inhabitants' own linked computers, rather than relying on powerful central servers like those that run Web sites or EverQuest's fantasy adventures," according to CNET. In theory, the security of the family PC would be no less vulnerable than if used to swap songs (and that is indeed vulnerable if owners aren't aware of what's being shared on the PC - see "File-sharing realities for families"); and the security of a young player would be no different than in a massively multiplayer game (with players worldwide). [For an arresting picture of Web-vs.-P2P Net activity, see this snapshot of network traffic at CacheLogic (Web use is that narrow little red band - gray, fuchsia, and aqua are all P2P).]

  7. Personal info gone missing

    This isn't exactly kid-tech news, but if anyone's interested in how some 600,000 past and present Time-Warner employees' personal info went missing, see this very readable New York Times article, which sort of explains what happened, or rather does a great job of giving us a picture of how "22,500 gigabytes (22.5 terabytes) of data" are backed up these days. It involves, for one thing, "the homely Ford Econoline 350" van - a fleet of them. Then the article asks some good questions, e.g., "To begin with, why would such sensitive information be handled less like a guard-this-with-your-life briefcase entrusted to Brinks than like a fungible bundle handed to the Dy-Dee Diaper Service? Why was the data unencrypted? And why were trucks involved at all?" Here's earlier coverage at USATODAY and CNET.

  8. Managing spam

    The bad news is, "nobody has found a technological fix for spam." The good news: it can "be managed," Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro reports. He then explains how, thoughtfully in terms you and I can understand. There's the one most of us have heard: "Never respond" to junk email messages. And there are some lesser-known tips, such as using current releases of email programs that don't display pictures in spam messages. Why? Because, if your version of Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc. "displays a picture in a spam message, it often does so by downloading the image from the spammer's Web site, which tells the sender you just read the spam." So s/he'll send you more spam! But read the article to get all of Rob's good pointers. And there's plenty more help at GetNetWise.

  9. 'Multi-purpose' mobiles

    Nearly 300 UK school and university students were disqualified from exams last summer because of cheating with mobile phones, the BBC reports. That's a 15.7% increase over the previous year. "Some students had attempted to receive answers via text messaging - particularly in more factual subjects such as maths and science. Others had inadvertently taken handsets into the exam hall." The latter could happen more and more, since there are now more mobiles than people in the UK, VNUNET.com reports. Meanwhile, get ready for ever-more-attractive, multi-purpose phones: "games and programs that let people connect, on their own terms, with anyone and everyone else," according to the vision of Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, cited by the BBC. Watch for "mobile gaming leagues" and other phenomena that are as much about connecting people as playing games (and not about fancy graphics).

  10. Moms & pop culture

    US mothers are worried about popular culture and its impact on their children, according to recent survey of 2,000 moms by the University of Minnesota. They're concerned about "what feels like a tsunami of forces threatening parents' ability to impart positive values to their children ... a cultural onslaught that goes far beyond Hollywood movies and TV, and into the world of the Internet, electronic games, and advertising," the Christian Science Monitor reports. The study's lead researcher, Martha Farrell Erickson, said the mothers surveyed were "a huge and diverse sample," from "full-time homemakers to full-fledged workaholics, all income levels, all racial background," citing hypersexuality, violence, disrespect, and body image among their concerns. Interestingly, "politics did not come up naturally in these mothers' group conversations; they see the solutions more through the avenue of personal and community action, rather than dumping these problems on the doorstep of government. Here's the study, "The Motherhood Study: Fresh Insights on Mothers' Attitudes and Concerns" and its sponsor, the New York-based Institute for American Values. For another perspective, see "Our Kids Are Not Doomed," a commentary in the Los Angeles Times by Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History" (Viking, 2005) and teacher of family history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

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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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