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January 25, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this fourth week of January:


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Family Tech

  1. Net-mom's newest book

    We (NetFamilyNews.org and SafeKids.com) are "Net-mom approved," so we're admitting our bias right up front. Still, there is no more reliable source for families wondering where to go for truly useful and safe - whether educational or just, plain fun - Web sites for kids (or anyone else). We're referring to "Netmom's Internet Kids & Family Yellow Pages" by writer, librarian, and mom Jean Armour Polly.

    The 2002 edition (the 6th), now available on bookstore shelves, reviews more than 3,000 Web sites in more than 130 subject areas. Add those numbers to sites perused for the previous five editions to get a feel for how many sites Jean's reviewed! She did the math. In a talk she gave at the Bertelsmann Foundation Conference in Germany last fall, Jean said, "Recently we estimated how many sites I have personally explored since the first edition of the book. We were stunned to discover that I have visited about 182,000 Web sites. If I looked at eight or nine sub pages for each site, that works out to about 1.5 million Web pages I have personally inspected since 1996." In that talk, she describes her site-selection process and policies - something that might be useful to other parents, librarians, and educators, as they undertake smaller versions of Jean's task.

    For a very useful sampler of Jean's picks for the book, see the "Hotlists from the 2002 Edition" in her Web site. Almost all of these are sites she chose specifically for kids, from preschoolers to those who love math, science, reading, writing, chat, or pen pals. Oh-so-cool "Son of Net-Mom" (Jean's teenage son) has his own special category of Web picks among the hotlists.

    No one who works with the Web for social studies homework or school research should miss "The World According to Net-mom". You really see the librarian at work in this remarkable new feature of the site, linking to sites - listed alphabetically by country - that Jean believes contain "some of the best information available on the Web about countries of the world." Information on hundreds of countries is linked to here, all of it screened for children's ability to understand it. And every single site (from several to nearly a dozen sites per country, including its dependencies) is described by Jean in child-friendly language.

    We'd appreciate hearing from you or your kids about your/their top picks for useful and/or fun Web sites at home or school. Do email them to us (and tell us why you picked 'em!).

    2. TV-filtering tech

    US kids spend 600 more hours a year watching television than they spend in school. That's one statistic SafeKids.com's Larry Magid cites in this week's Family Tech column about the various ways parents can "filter" children's TV-viewing experience. He looks at technologies such as the V Chip and digital video recorders, Web sites that offer TV-viewing tips and policies, and policies his own family has found useful. See also our item on the new "ProtecTV" filtering box, at the bottom of last week's Web News Briefs. Share your family rules for intelligent TV consumption - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Kazaa, Aimster, and other Net-music news

    The digital music fans at your house or school probably already know this, but there have been strange goings-on at music file-trading sites this week. We just went to Aimster.com and got this message, "The site that used to be found at this Web address has moved. Click here if you want to go to that page. The new page is not in any way affiliated with this page or the owner of this page." AOL Time Warner is now "the owner of this page" and the Aimster.com domain name, under a settlement with the site's former operator, AbovePeer, Newsbytes.com reports. And the very popular site formerly known as Aimster.com is now AbovePeer's Madster.com (which we couldn't even access, apparently because everybody else was trying to, too).

    Even more lively were developments at KaZaA.com, another hot file-sharing gathering place. KaZaA.com closed its doors last week, then opened them again this week, when Netherlands-based KaZaA BV sold the site and other assets to Australia-based Sharman Networks Ltd. According to England-based TheRegister.com, KaZaA - along with MusicCity.com and Grokster.com (two other file-sharing communities that use the software code of a developer called FastTrack) - was in the middle of a lawsuit filed last October by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). KaZaA suspended downloads voluntarily last week, pending a Dutch judge's decision, but then the new Australian owner reinstated downloading and reopened KaZaA.com for business. As yet, no one is completely sure how Sharman is going to avoid litigation. Here's WashingtonPost.com's version. And, to cover all the bases, the news this week that the RIAA's long-standing case against Napster is on hold while the two sides try to work out a settlement - from Wired News.

    You may remember that MusicCity.com's Morpheus software was the subject of one of our subscribers' concerns. A mother in Kansas emailed us last July because her teenage son was using Morpheus to search for and download pornographic images (see "Sexual images & filtering," July 13). A few weeks later, two US lawmakers made a well-publicized announcement about the risks to kids of file-sharing software that enabled th peer-to-peer trading of images (see "Family Tech," Aug. 3).

  2. ID theft: Top consumer fraud problem

    Identity theft and Web auction fraud accounted for more than half of all consumer fraud complaints the US Federal Trade Commission received last year. According to WashingtonPost.com, the FTC said ID theft was way out in front, comprising 42% of the more than 200,000 consumer fraud complaints it got in 2001. Web auction fraud complaints represented 10% of the complaints total. "ID thieves targeted credit card holder most often, totaling 42% of those identity thefts. Phone or utilities fraud remained the second most popular way to steal someone's identity," the Post reports. Residents of the District of Columbia, California, Nevada, Maryland, and New York, respectively, were most likely to have their identities stolen. Here's Wired News on this story.

  3. The languages of cyberspace

    As of last December 1st, native English speakers represented only 43% of the global online population. That's according to the latest data of Global Reach, via Nua Internet Surveys. In other findings, 32% were native speakers of European languages and 24.7% were native Asian language speakers. After English, Japanese was the next most-spoken language in cyberspace, representing 8.9% of the world's Net users, then Chinese (8.8%), German (6.8%), Spanish (6.5%), Korean (4.6%), Italian (3.8%), French (3.3%), and Portuguese (2.6%).

  4. Net developments in China

    It's just gotten tougher for the average email user in China to enjoy any degree of privacy. It's also gotten tougher to be an Internet service provider in China! The Chinese government last week issued ISPs new orders, requiring them to "screen private email for political content" and holding them responsible for "illegal postings that appear on Web sites they host," according to the Associated Press reports (via SiliconValley.com). "Under the new rules, general portal sites must install security programs to screen and copy all email messages sent or received by users. Those containing 'sensitive materials' must be turned over to authorities," the AP reports. The rules included a long list of "prohibited content," including that which reveals state secrets, hurts China's reputation, or advocates the overthrow of communism, ethnic separatism, or "evil cults."

    Meanwhile, China this week launched its largest-ever human rights Web site. "The English-language site was set up with a promise to present the nation's human rights situation 'comprehensively and objectively'," Wired News reports, adding: "But Web users expecting a self-examining review of China's record on human rights will be disappointed." For example, Wired points to the inclusion of a speech by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson but "scant reference" to US-sponsored resolutions at the UN human rights conference that rebuke China's record. Our thanks to BNA Internet Law News for pointing these stories out.

  5. UK online kids wising up

    UK children's willingness to give out personal contact information has "dropped by two-thirds in 18 months," a just-released survey by NOP Research Group has found. "Only 11% of 7-16-year-olds polled in the UK last November would give out their home address online to get free samples, gifts, or information." That figure was 29% in June 2000, NOP says. The survey also found better Net-safety awareness on parents' part: "Asked why they wouldn't give out their home address over the Internet, 41% of young users said that their parents told them not to, up from the equivalent 33% recorded in autumn 2000." Here's a brief item on this at Nua Internet Surveys.

    Another NOP survey arrived at some remarkable figures on mobile phone use among UK youth: 82% of 14-to-16-year-olds now have mobile phones, and even 23% of 7-to-10-year-olds do.

  6. Tougher sentences for UK pedophiles

    On the perpetrator side, another important development in the UK was the announcement this week of new guidelines for child-porn sentencing. This is London suggests that part of the reason for the stiffer rules was "deep public and professional concern" over the jail terms of between 12 and 30 months handed down last year to members of the Wonderland pedophile ring, "who amassed and traded hundreds of thousands" of pornographic images of children (see our "Child porn update" last fall). This is London adds that the seven Wonderland members would've faced "many years behind bars" under the new guidelines, due to go into effect some time in the 2nd quarter of this year. (Our thanks to QuickLinks for pointing this piece out.)

  7. 'Surf's up' for US women

    As CNET puts it, the number of US women "heading home to surf" is growing rapidly - faster than men or the overall online population. Citing Nielsen/NetRatings figures, CNET reports that the number of female Web surfers at home "rose 9% in the United States, from 50.4 million in December 2000 to 55 million" this past December. The overall number of active home Web surfers grew only 6%, from 98.6 million to 104.8 million in the same period, and the number of men online at home increased just 3% during that period. However, men spend more time online - 24% more time, N/NR added, pointing to the "time poverty" women face at home, "because they shoulder household responsibilities such as childcare and meal planning." As for what the two genders do with that time, women "tend to visit health, fashion, beauty, parenting and shopping sites...; men tend to visit sites that focus on their offline interests such as sports, news, and entertainment sites."

  8. Guide for after-school tech

    Now that US after-school programs have a record $1 billion to spend, under the just-passed Elementary and Secondary Education Act, they also have help in figuring out how to spend it. ESchoolNews reports on the timely advice coming from the Morino Institute and the Education Development Center Inc. in the form of "The YouthLearn Guide: A Creative Approach to Working with Youth and Technology." It's "designed as a field guide for associations and nonprofit organizations that support after-school activities, [and] it's also applicable to school districts looking to integrate technology into their after-school or in-school programs," eSchoolNews adds. The $29.95, 160-page handbook includes "dozens of hands-on lessons, worksheets, and sample activities," and covers planning, staffing, and program management. Nonprofit and subscriber discounts are available.

  9. 'Trustworthy computing'

    You all may have noticed, as we have, that so many reports about computer viruses point to Microsoft's Outlook Express email software as the worm's or virus's way into people's computers. Well, "it's about time" undoubtedly echoed through the land with release of the news that Microsoft is making customers' security a priority. "In a memo sent to Microsoft's 47,000 employees this week, [Chairman Bill] Gates, the company's chief software engineer, called for a fundamental shift in Microsoft's product development that will put consumers' security and privacy concerns ahead of adding new features to the company's products," Wired News reports. Wired also points to some skepticism on the part of security experts. Here's the Gates memo and CNET's version of the story.

    There's another reason why MS's new priority is a good thing: the risks to customer security and privacy represented by the company's ".Net" push (shifting some computing tasks from the PC over to the Internet to make the Net a new revenue stream for the company). SafeKids.com's Larry Magid explains those risks in a recent column for the Los Angeles Times.

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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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