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January 11, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this first full week of January:


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Family Tech

  1. Using Word to make paper invitations

    Forget those fancy (and restrictive) create-a-card software packages, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid suggests. Good-ol' Word, the word-processing program that almost everybody has, worked just as well for him when he and his son were charged with creating the grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary invitation. In his Family Tech column for the San Jose Mercury News this week, Larry takes you through their successful card-creation process, concluding - to his credit - that "even though I have access to all of these high-tech tools, I'm still not as good about sending cards as is my mother-in-law, who doesn't even own a PC. Technology can take you just so far."

  2. Should families use online-safety tech?

    That's the question Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer H.J. Simmons put to us and other parents in an article the paper ran this week. H.J. cited one Journal of the American Medical Association study finding that, "while 84% of parents have established rules on Internet use, ... only 25% use technical controls on family computers." When she asked parents in Minnesota if they'd install filtering or monitoring software on family computers, she got responses ranging "out of the question" to "a reasonable precaution." The article's worth reading to find out some of the reasoning behind those reactions.

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Via Childnet: Great sites by and/or for children (and teachers and parents!)

We think you'll be as inspired as we were to read even a little bit about these Web sites that are all about children:

Could there be better antidotes to ignorance and terrorism - or more compelling educational tools - than these? And that's a mere handful of the 11 remarkable Web sites on this year's Childnet Awards Shortlist, accessible in English, Spanish, and French. They represent four categories: the original three - Individual, School, and Not-for-Profit Web projects - and a new one called "New to the Net," recognizing "individuals, schools, or nonprofit organizations that may not have an existing Web site," as Childnet describes them, "but have exciting and realistic new ideas for projects using the Internet that would make a real difference to the lives of young people."

The awards program attracted 161 entries from 38 countries. The 11 finalists receive cash prizes and a trip to Paris in April 2002 for the Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards ceremony, when the winner of each category will be announced.

Other remarkable sites not on the Shortlist that received commendations (18 of them, also described here) include: an Egypt-based site that connects people involved in Scouting across the Arabic world; a 16-year-old's US-based site about career-planning that includes video interviews with leaders in six fields (so far); a Belgium-based school site that asked the question - "How many famous Flemish writers, artists, or politicians can you name?" - of 7,000 schools worldwide and published the responses; and a France-based project to produce a special journey through which blind and partially sighted young people can travel together and share their experiences by together creating a special audio-enhanced Web site.

* For 45 years Ethiopian Asfaw Yemiru "has devoted all of his time and energy to help underprivileged children in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa," ChildrensWorld.org tells us. "At the age of nine, he was himself a street-child and at the age of 14 he started his first school for street children, under a large oak tree." A global jury of children voted him the winner of the 2001 World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. He also received The Global Friends Award, as chosen by "thousands of students in 15 countries."

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A subscriber responds: Broadband woes in Utah, too

Subscriber Becky in Utah emailed us this week with her own tough experience at a DSL customer of AT&T AtHome and the recent changes to its high-speed connection service. Please note her advice to AOL subscribers interested in upgrading to DSL or cable connections (note, too, more advice from Anne in California just below Becky's):

"I read your newsletter and agreed wholeheartedly with Anne in California, who related her difficulties with AT&T. We discovered that there is a monopoly going on. When I spoke with people at AOL-Time/Warner about going with them for cable or DSL, they said they are not able to provide service to us in this area (We looked into Earthlink cable & DSL). Our only options were to go back to a dial up with AOL (which I did try for a few days and nearly went crazy) or return to AT&T, which we felt forced to do. We still spent hours (NO exaggeration) and ended up with tech support that was unhelpful and often undid the solutions to problems we thought we had already solved.

"I did feel bad for the AT&T workers; one man told me he had been on the phone for 14 hours (I felt like had too). We have a Web site, which of course we lost because it was provided through Excite. We had to put that up again and got a high school techy to help us. While at our house, he quickly fixed our home network that AT&T had told us was unusable until mid-January. It feels like AT&T is rotting with inefficiency and poor training. When I spoke with AOL, they encouraged me to visit their complaints area and speak up about my frustrations. They said that with lots of pleas for help the availability of AOL (cable) in our area might happen faster.

"SO I suggest to all your readers that they make their feelings known. I don't recall where he said to go in their Web site but, navigating around, one probably can find it. AOL organizes their site so well. I never had problems with my dialup service with them. It's just that once you have had high-speed access, it is too hard to go back."

Subscriber Anne in California later emailed us this about customer support:

"If users are experiencing problems, they should contact AT&T billing and make them aware of it. Until adequate service is restored, they are entitled to reimbursement of two days for every one day they were offline or experiencing reduced speeds."

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Web News Briefs

  1. Borders in cyberspace

    Advocates of privacy and civil rights on the Internet have concerns. Some parents will be relieved. Both reactions to new technologies that represent the online equivalent of border guards are certainly legitimate. The Washington Post uses that analogy, referring to technologies that allow Internet businesses to deny access to Web surfers without proper ID. The Post gives the example of UKBetting.com, which employs software that checks identification to determine where users are dialing in from. "Most people are waved on through. Those from the United States, China, Italy and other countries where gambling laws are muddy, however, are flashed a sign in red letters that says 'ACCESS DENIED' and are locked out of the Web site." Another application for said might be purveyors of pornography on the Web.

    But the downside, pointed out by privacy and free-speech advocates, is that "the technology will make it easier for oppressive governments to stifle nonconformist viewpoints, and that people's privacy will be eroded, especially because some [geolocation] technologies can pinpoint one's location," the Post reports. It cites one company's claim that its software can correctly identify a computer user's home country 98% of the time and city about 85% of the time (if it's a large city) and independent studies putting such programs' accuracy rate at 70-90%. A sobering thought when imagining such software in the hands of an authoritarian government.

  2. Best-selling 'puter ever made?

    That's what one analyst interviewed by Wired News thinks about the just-unveiled new iMac, one of whose nicknames is the "iWant." Wired reports that even died-in-the-wool PC owners want to go out and buy this iMac. The computer's price, starting at $1,299, nearly as attractive as its design. Another Wired piece has a bunch of pictures of the new iMac. And here's Internet.com's breaking story from the floor at Macworld Expo in San Francisco Monday and the New York Times on this "strikingly futuristic, elemental, beautiful - and strange ... bike helmet of a PC."

    And while we're on Apple news, Maine this week announced its $37.2 million contract with the computer company to supply all 7th- and 8th-grade students and their teachers in the state with wirelessly connected iBook laptops. The Wired News story about what appears to be the biggest-yet ed tech purchase by a US state quotes Maine Governor Angus King as saying that "the economic future will belong to the technologically adept." The contract includes the installation of a wireless network infrastructure in all of Maine's 241 middle schools, ongoing help desk support and maintenance, and teacher training. That last item's important because Maine teachers "have a huge task ahead of them" in learning how to integrate one-to-one computing into their classroom work, Wired News reports in a separate article.

    But, hey, tell us what you think of the new iMac - too much form over function, or gotta have it? You know where we are (and we love to hear from you).

  3. Child porn: MSN's response

    Writer John Lettice at Britain's TheRegister.com this week called the UK offices of Microsoft Network, reporting that he'd found "large quantities of child pornography" in its Latin America community channel. MSN quickly shut the site down after the call, but John said he called after an email someone else had sent abuse@msn.com more than 24 hours previously (the sender had cc:'d him) had received no response.

    "I can't say with any certainty that nothing would have happened if I'd just left it," John writes, "and a spokeswoman for MSN tells me 'it was already being investigated by the MSN team and should, by the time you receive this email have been disabled in accordance with MSN's Notice and Take Down policy. But one still wonders about why it takes much more than an instant to investigate and pull the plugs, in a case like this." More than MSN, the piece is really about the question of whether large Web sites that host user content (portals) should do a better job of monitoring what they're hosting and taking quick action where needed.

  4. Library filtering on the rise

    Forty-three percent of US libraries used filtering software on Net-connected computers in 2001, up from 31% the previous year, reports Newsbytes.com, citing a survey published in Library Journal. Newsbytes suggests the increase may partially be in response to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires e-rate-funded schools and libraries to use filtering or blocking software on Net-connect computers that kids use. The law, where it concerns libraries, is being challenged in the courts by the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union and is not yet fully in effect. Newsbytes quotes experts as saying there are probably other reasons for libraries' increased use of filtering, such as improved filtering tech, "giving library administrators more power to tailor Internet access to their patrons." Here's CNET's version of this story.

  5. MP3 fan's movements tracked

    Users of file-sharing software may be sharing more than their music file collections, warns Wired News. "A Trojan horse program masquerading as an advertising application was included with recent versions of [file-sharing] programs BearShare, LimeWire, Kazaa, and Grokster," the Wired News article says. How the trojan horse works is a bit complicated, but the bottom line is that it regularly reports a user's ID and the URLs of all Web site s/he's visited. Bearshare, Limewire, etc., reportedly didn't even know this privacy-invading code was included in the "ClickTillUWin" contest software they use, offering their users a chance to win prizes.

  6. Top 10 school tech stories of '01

    Well, for US schools, that is. According to eSchoolNews, among the Top 10 topics are articles about how the September 11 attacks affected school communities (whether it's ok to show children live TV coverage, policies about using cell phones in school, what to tell children about public health threats, etc.); the Bush administration's impact on educational technology funding; schools being forced to filter Net access under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA); and schools increasingly out-sourcing IT (information technology services).

  7. The battle over tech in homes

    Forget Net appliances. As a teenager might say, "they're very five minutes ago." They certainly haven't replaced PCs or TVs, as envisioned. But now tech companies are scrambling after a bigger vision: creating a box that will supersede both PC and TV, to control all the media coming into the house. The New York Times reports on that concept: the "home media server, integrating the functions of several devices - digital video recorder, CD player, DVD player, MP3 music player - with an Internet connection and a high-speed wireless home network.' This might sound slightly familiar. For several years we've been hearing about one appliance that will allow us to consume any type of media, plus compile a grocery list (if not do the shopping). They keep trying. The Times piece is mostly about a TV-oriented system being put together by Moxie Digital (a new company formed by a former Apple hardware designer and co-founder of WebTV), which plans to hook up with satellite and cable operators. Another aggressive player in this space is Apple itself, long very media-oriented, now with its new iPOD MP3 player and other popular digital-media tech. Here's Wired News's take on this from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

    We still think the couch potatoes in all of us will want to view our TV screens from a distance and the PC dweebs in all of us will want to research the Web, read email and IMs, and play multiplayer games with the screen right in our faces. In any case, it's fun to follow the battle over our domestic media futures. But what do you think about the all-in-one box concept? Do email us!

  8. Child exploitation conference wrapup

    UNICEF has now published a number of pages on the Web looking back at last month's "Second World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children" in Yokohama, Japan (see our news brief on this). Here's UNICEF's press release , which says that the Dec. conference "achieved all we expected - and more," with more than 1,000 participants above the 2,000 they'd planned for and 134 government delegations, up from the 122 that attended the previous (and first) such conference in '96. The press release links to full treatment of the conference in UNICEF's Web site.

  9. Net safer for kids (in UK)?

    ZDNet UK asks that question, because it's a little more than a year since Britain sentenced its first Internet pedophile. After the trial "Internet chatrooms were recognised as a breeding ground for sophisticated Net predators," ZDNet's Wendy McAuliffe writes, "and the Home Office was compelled to pave new legislation that would criminalise the online 'grooming' of children. But with nothing on the statute books to date, there is little evidence to suggest that Internet chatrooms are any safer for children than they were a year ago." One good outcome of the case of pedophile Patrick Green was a Web site that educates kids and parents about safe online chatting: ChatDanger.com.

  10. Teens charge with Net crimes

    A US high school student made about $1 million in a fraudulent Internet investment scheme, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week. According to Reuters (via SiliconValley.com), 17-year-old "Cole Bartiromo, who lives with his parents in Mission Viegho, Calif., defrauded 1,000 investors through a Web site and Internet bulletin board that promised guaranteed and risk-free investments." The SEC says he has settled the case, agreeing to turn over about $900,000 of investor money he had transferred into an account he controlled at a Costa Rican casino. Here's Newsbytes.com's version of the story. Our thanks to BNA Internet Law News for pointing this piece out.

    Newsbytes.com also reported this week on a Norwegian teenager charged with a different type of crime: When he was 15, Jon Johansen, now 18, wrote the DeCSS computer program "designed to defeat an encryption-based copy protection system" used to protect copyrighted films on DVDs. Newsbytes reports that Jon's been charged "under Norwegian Criminal Code Section 145(2), which makes it a crime to break into another person's locked property to gain access to data one is not allowed access to." Here's Wired News's version.

  11. Net-fueled 'pester power'

    It's about kids pestering parents for products seen on the Internet. According to figures cited by Nua Internet Surveys, nearly 60% of US children say they have asked their parents to buy products they've seen on the Net. The survey also found that a quarter of US children spend 10 or more hours online a week, up from an average of 19% for the previous five years the study's been conducted.

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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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