Search this site!
 
toolbar

Dear Subscribers:

"Awareness of what's out there [on the Net] has kept me on my toes," wrote one parent in our Subscriber Survey, a mom in Illinois whose family has worked out a smart Internet-use policy. A respondent in Massachusetts suggested we write more about "the global interconnectivity of the Net and how to harness it more effectively." We'll work on that! These are just two of the hundreds of helpful comments and ideas we've received from many of you. Thank you!

But we need to hear from more of you - especially subscribers in the 40+ other countries represented on this list! Your responses help us both improve the service and seek funding - and it's all we ask in return for this nonprofit news service. So, last call (at last)! If you haven't already, please fill out the survey. We'll summarize and publish the results for everybody's benefit at the end of the year.

There's a lot of news this week - something for everybody. We try to keep all of your interests in mind - home, school, work - so just pick what's relevant! Here's the lineup for these first days of November:


~~~~~~~~~~~ Sponsor ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Low-cost or free, best-selling software for home and classroom from Sierra, Disney
IBM/Edmark, Mattel and more! Please click on...
Publishers Pipeline - Hundreds of titles. All free, or nearly so, after rebate. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Family Tech

  1. Kids' online safety: Singing its praises

    Now here's something completely different: a song about online safety! There are lots of tips, rules, and sites, for both parents and kids, floating around cyberspace, but this is much for fun - for little kids, especially. Until now nobody's done a song just for them on this important theme. SafeKids.com's Larry Magid wrote the lyrics and Daffy Dave (Mampel), a popular Silicon Valley singer, songwriter, and children's entertainer, wrote and sings the tune. Listen to it here. If you don't have it already, you can download the player at MP3.com (click on "Get a free MP3 player" at the top of their home page). Tell us what you think of it (via feedback@netfamilynews.org)!

  2. Uncle Sam & Net filters

    As of this writing the US Congress hasn't yet passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving federal "e-rate" funding to install porn filters, but it probably will within the week. And President Clinton is likely then to sign the law, because it's attached to an appropriations bill needed to fund some government departments next year. In which case, it will undoubtedly be challenged in court by free-speech and civil liberties organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid in his Family Tech column at the San Jose Mercury News. "If the case comes to trial," he adds, "I'll volunteer to testify against the law just as I did last year when the ACLU and a coalition of newspapers and Web sites argued against the Children's Online Protection Act." Read Larry's column to find out why!

    Meanwhile, even as the bill is about to pass, reports the Associated Press (via USAToday), "the measure's supporters admit the [filtering] tools aren't perfect and want communities also to study other ways to combat child pornography on the World Wide Web." Furthermore, says the USIIA Bulletin, "Congress's own commission on child protection refused to endorse such a [school-filtering] measure." The Bulletin is referring to the COPA Commission, which recently released its online-safety recommendations to Congress (see "Subscribers write" below for more).

  3. Meet a 'father of the Net'

    Vint Cerf was a computer science professor back in the '70s, when he co-created the file-sharing technology behind the Internet. Now he's helping to take the Net beyond Earth, working on the Internet's "interplanetary backbone" so that the robotic devices now exploring our solar system can use the Net to "talk" to each other and to Earth. Great stuff for science students, "Trekkies," and Internet historians in your home or classroom!

    Here's Larry Magid's audio interview with Vint at Redband and "A Brief History of the Internet", co-authored by Vint Cerf, with links to the Web pages and email addresses of fellow Net founders. In the interview, Vint talks about "turning what once was science fiction into reality," the real role of Vice President Al Gore in all this, legislation concerning the Net, and what's ahead for all us Net users.

* * * *

For (the US's) Election Day: Men, women, youth

Our thanks to FamilyEducation.com for offering a different perspective on the US presidential election: a "behind-the-scenes look at the candidates - from their wives". The feature offers the views of Laura Bush and Tipper Gore on family issues such as education and paid parenting leave, as well as full interviews with both.

As for the candidates themselves, ZDNet has taken a look at where they stand on on technology issues. On the voter side, here's a Wired News piece on Generation Y, the Youth-e-Vote mock election (in which more than 1 million students have already voted for president), and youth's views on voting when they're eligible.

* * * *

New online-safety resource: ChatDanger.com

Childnet International says it has long felt that chat rooms "pose the biggest threat to child safety on the Internet." After this London-based nonprofit organization last July heard from the parents of a 13-year-old girl who had been contacted in a Net chat room and sexually abused by a pedophile (who has since been convicted), it decided to take action. The result is ChatDanger.com, designed to alert parents and get companies that run chat services to provide better safety advice for children.

If you find this resource useful, do tell us about it!

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. Filtering law: Not-so-small changes

    We hear some schools and libraries breathing a sigh of relief when they read this news: The White House has gotten the sponsors of the likely-to-pass school-filtering law to make "minor changes" to its wording, as TheStandard.com puts it. But they're not so minor. Just one of those changes - from the words "filtering software" to "technology protection measures" - could spell a huge difference to schools and libraries. For one thing, it could well mean that towns and school districts will no longer have to scrap some of the online-safety measures they already had in place - something that would've had to happen if the law specifically required the installation of filtering software on all e-rate-funded, Net-connected computers. But it's not over yet. Congress still hasn't voted on the appropriations bill (HR-4577) to which this legislation is attached, which means that the ACLU and other civil-liberties organizations are still watching to see if they want to challenge the law in court if the President signs it. Watch this space!

  2. Important Net-use study

    A just-released UCLA study challenges a number of common perceptions about the Internet - including the digital divide and user isolation. In its article about the study, USAToday reports that "nearly two-thirds of all Americans have ventured online, and the majority of them deny the Internet creates social isolation…. In fact, the majority of Internet users said e-mail, Web sites and chat rooms have a 'modestly positive impact' on their abilities to make new friends and communicate more with family." The USIIA Bulletin focused on the digital divide question, citing the study's finding that "some 41% of adults with incomes under $15,000 use the Internet, as do 6% of adults with incomes of $15,000 to $49,000. While there's still a gap between these and more affluent users, the digital divide appears in this study to be far less than is popularly portrayed." Here's where the whole study can be downloaded - the findings start on p. 15.

  3. Many pedophiles caught

    It's being billed as "the largest sting operation ever against pedophiles online," according to the USIIA Bulletin. It also indicates that the global nature of the Internet is requiring new levels of corporate-government cooperation. Working together, the Italian government and Microsoft created a Web site that enticed 1,500 pedophiles in Italy, Britain, Switzerland, and the US to register so they could send illegal pictures and videos. In doing so, they incriminated themselves. "The sting operation followed the arrest of eight people last month in Italy," the Bulletin reported. Here's coverage in Newsbytes.com.

  4. Napster's turning point

    Big news for Net music heads broke this week, when German media giant Bertelsmann issued a milestone announcement about Napster. According to Wired News, Bertelsmann, which owns the BMG record label, said it would lend Napster some money and pull out of the record industry's lawsuit against Napster in exchange for a promise that Napster would develop a subscription file-sharing service for Bertelsmann. That doesn't mean Napster still can't be shut down by the court that's deciding the recording industry's case, but it does indicate two things important to Napster users: a new life for Napster's extremely popular file-sharing technology (the good news) and the beginning of the end of being able to swap tunes for free (the bad news). Here's TheStandard.com's take on all the media coverage of the story this week.

  5. Ever easier access to porn (everywhere)

    Why does it seem that pornography is more accessible - to children and everyone - than ever before? Because it is - on TV, in hotel rooms, in video stores, as well as on the Internet, at least in the US (subscribers in other countries, do tell us the situation where you live!). And big blue-chip companies are helping to make it so, but they won't talk about it. "None of the corporate leaders of AT&T, Time Warner, General Motors, EchoStar, Liberty Media, Marriott International, Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment or the News Corporation - all companies that have a big financial stake in adult films and that are held by millions of shareholders - were willing to speak publicly about the sex side of their businesses," reports the New York Times in a comprehensive article on the subject. On the Internet, although sex sites constitute only about 2% of the public Web (see our report on "The Web's growth"), "about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month - more people than go to sports or government sites," the Times adds.

  6. Microsoft hack & your privacy

    Some of you may have heard about the week's top tech story: the hacker who got into Microsoft's internal network and MS's *evolving* explanation in the media. We weren't going to bother you with it until we saw the good job ZDNet did in explaining what this means to all of us Net users. The bottom line: Microsoft wants to be the keeper of all our personal and professional data, ZDNet says. "The recent hack job in Redmond suggests there's still a long way to go" - considering the fact that MS creates software nearly all of us use (Word) and the damage that a "backdoor" into every copy of Word would cause. "Unfortunately," ZDNet adds, "as our de facto standard bearer, Microsoft is behaving just as badly as most companies…. They became a victim of a hacker who was not particularly sophisticated."

  7. Filtering images too

    It looks like some European companies are set to take Web filtering to a new level. A Paris-based company called LookThatUp has announced ImageFilter, an "image recognition engine," reports CNET. And two German companies, Biodata Information Technology and Cobion, this week announced they're developing an Internet filtering platform called I-Watch for corporate fire walls which includes image filtering.

  8. Will college campuses go away?

    Author and management guru Peter Drucker said so back in '97, but it didn't ruffle too many university presidents' feathers then. Now they all seem to be rushing at least to offer some courses online. The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Gerald Heeger, president of University of Maryland University College, which has "earned a reputation as one of the top 'virtual universities.' UMUC," it reports, "offers 15 undergraduate and 10 graduate degrees online. Last year, it enrolled 40,000 students in online courses, double the number of the previous year."

  9. Digital after-school programs

    Here's a snapshot from the New York Times's Education section of how two national after-school programs - AOL's "PowerUp" and Intel's "Computer Clubhouse" - are approaching tech learning.

  10. Sneaky Uncle Sam

    Even while the US government touts the importance of protecting consumer privacy, the Web sites of 13 agencies "secretly track visitors' Internet habits," reports TheStandard.com. The article names the agencies and provides links to related articles in other news sites.

  11. Dot-coms in dorms (still)

    Talk to some ambitious young dot-com executives, and it'll feel like the "dot-com revolution" is far from over. The New York Times gave quite a lot of column inches to an interview with four college-age founders of young technology companies, providing fascinating insights into their thinking on school and careers, today's college environment (in the US), and the Internet economy.

* * * *

Girl portals, boy games (PlayStation 2, etc.)

In "Teenage Wasteland", TheStandard.com says sites targeting teens (read teenaged girls) are "under more pressure than an adolescent," struggling - and mostly failing - to hold their teen audiences' interest. And they're not just talking about the demise of Kibu.com (see our Oct. 6 issue). Here's a Wired News update on a "Gen Y's Virtual Playground" - Jester.com - that appears to have a better formula for survival.

Subscriber Gen Katz, editor of Games4girls.com, says these sites' struggles are no tragedy. "Girl portals losing their punch - Good. They have probably underrated girls and failed to appreciate them as more than eyeballs to attract and data to be acquired. The crass materialism behind these kinds of sites is perfectly obvious to the youth culture that has been courted for their amount of disposable income. What none of us have is disposable time, and we become choosy as to where it goes. Girls and women want to be connected to the real world. They will go for just so much computer meta stuff before they will want to touch the fabric, hug a friend, smell the scent. There is still a glass wall between the computer and life, and the girls know it."

As for boys, we all know where their interests lie: games (another gross generalization reflecting Web market research, cited in our "big picture" report on online boys vs. girls). For any of you with console-game aficionados in your house (or classroom!), here's some valuable information. Reuters has done a great job of explaining what's going on now and what's coming down the pipe. Everybody in this group knows PlayStation 2 is the hottest thing on store shelves this holiday season - if only they can get their hands on one (Sony shipped half of what it promised this fall). But the battle is far from over. This is just the beginning of a whole new marketing war that parents might want to be aware of, and - given all that's happening - it might be ok that the PlayStation 2 is not as accessible as some gamers would like. Might be worth a family conversation!

Besides Sony, there's Sega's Dreamcast (which tends to appeal to older gamers and focuses heavily on interactive gaming across the Net with the help of its new gamer-friendly Internet service); Nintendo's 405-MHz GameCube, to arrive on the scene next fall; and Microsoft's Xbox with its whopping 733 MHz chip, also coming next fall. (When it comes to technology Microsoft's not messing around, *but*, Reuters explains, software is just as important as hardware. Gamers will be looking at what games they can actually run on those machines.)

But if it's still PlayStation 2 that your console gamer wants, there are ways. For example, the product could be had at eBay.com this week for about a 100% markup, according to Wired News.

Your comments on any of these kid pastimes - how or whether they're being used in your house - are most welcome.

* * * *

Cyber Pen Pals in DC: Reading, writing… & technology!

Our thanks to ConnectforKids.org for telling us the story about children's author Carolivia Herron and her Cyber Pen Pals program for kids in Washington, D.C.'s public schools. It's a program these inner-city school elementary school students both delighted in and took very seriously. And that meant working very hard at good grammar and spelling in their emails. Do check out: "Helping Young Writers, Cyber-Style". The article includes links to two great telementoring resources.

If your kids are in a school telementoring program, we'd love to hear about their experience.

* * * *

Subscribers write

  1. Porn sites: The 'mouse-trapping' problem

    Subscribe Roger in California emailed us this week:

    "I hit a link from a search engine, and I do not remember what or how it happened, but I was searching for Disney on Yahoo.com and a link I clicked took me to [a porn] site, which spawned many windows. Each of those windows spawned more windows, all porn of some sort. I pulled the page from my history. I tried it once more, and it was in fact the page that started it. What can we do about things like this?"

    [Editor's Note: This so-called "mouse-trapping" technique - reportedly popular in the Net pornography industry - is one specifically cited by the COPA Commission in its recommendations to Congress. The Commission called for greater enforcement of obscenity laws and possibly new, Net-specific, rules to discourage deceptive practices like this. Here's Wired News's story on the subject. That's a long way of saying that better law enforcement and technologies such as age verification are certainly in the works, but about all a concerned user can do right now is avoid stumbling on such sites by using existing technologies that can help. For example, there are a number of search engines that offer filtered search, including Google.com, Lycos.com, AJKids.com, and Go.com.]

  2. More help in tackling hate

    Referring to our news item, "Decoding hate" in the last issue, subscriber Jane in Ontario wrote us about her organization's "Challenging Online Hate: A Guide for Parents and Teachers". It's an excellent Web resource from the Media Awareness Network, a Canadian nonprofit media-education organization aimed at encouraging critical thinking in children.

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and colleagues? We would much appreciate your referral. To subscribe, they can just send an email to subscribe@netfamilynews.org - no need to type anything in the Subject field or the body of the message.

We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

   Just type in a question and click Ask!
 Powered by Ask Jeeves Kids technology


HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 2000 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy