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February 1, 2002

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Here's our lineup as we head into February:


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Kids' online safety: A police officer's update

A recent conversation with Officer Ken Hansen, expert on Net crimes against children, turned up three new trends developing in his field - trends parents should know about:

  1. Strangers can intrude on a child's instant-messaging session. ("We've made a couple of arrests where we're on IM [posing as a child] and somebody contacts us. I don't know how they [pedophiles] do it, but there's a way they can see we're on IM, and they can hit us. One incident happened on Yahoo! [Messenger] and one on MSN [Messenger]." When we asked him if a child has to do anything special to signal s/he's online, Ken added that it can happen with a child doing nothing but IM-ing with a friend.)

  2. Game chat is a new and growing trouble spot, where pedophiles find and "groom" unsuspecting kids. Chat and discussion boards can be found wherever gamers gather on the Net - in specific game sites like UnrealTournament.com or Operation Flashpoint or info+community sites like GameSpy.com, GameSpot.com, or Battle.net. Ken told us that pedophiles' most obvious way to worm their way into kids' lives is by getting them to talk about their interests. Gamers are no different. (For more on gamers and popular game sites, see our 2-part series on teen gamers, Nov. 16 and 30.)

  3. Ken and his colleagues on Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force no longer have time to spend in chat rooms, posing as teenagers to catch pedophiles (letting the latter set up face-to-face meetings with the "teenagers" so they can be arrested for "online enticement"*). "We're at the point where we're just maxed out on cases. We can't do proactive work because we have so many reactive cases," Ken said, referring to cases they've been sent by other task forces, police departments, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline (1-800-THE-LOST or http://www.cybertipline.com). The bad news is Ken's team is so busy. The good news is that the Task Force is getting referrals from all over the country now - US law enforcement has become well-educated about Internet crimes against children.

Like many members of Internet crime task forces in the US (there are 30), Ken is an experienced police officer, most recently a sergeant with the Salt Lake City Police Department, supervising vice, gang, traffic, and patrol units. He told us that while he was in the Vice Squad, he started an ICAC-type program for his department. "That is the reason why I was selected by the Attorney General's Office to be the director of the Utah ICAC. The Utah ICAC Task Force started on January 18, 2000. Since that time we have investigated just over 300 cases. Most of those cases have been either manufacturing, distributing, or possessing child pornography. About 25% of our cases relate to Internet predators."

Part of Ken's work on the Task Force is educating parents and educators about how to help kids stay safe online. At meetings and conferences, he tells them there is no better safeguard than...

  1. Monitoring/spot-checking what's happening on the kid's computer screen, and
  2. Understanding what s/he sees on that computer screen.

"To have filtering on a computer is fine," Ken says, "but most important is knowing exactly where your children are going on the computer, and knowing yourself how the computer and Internet work."

To get him to expand on that a bit, we asked, "So technology is only part of the solution?" "It is," was the response. "It can work very well in terms of keeping kids out of certain Web sites and also providing reports [using monitoring software], but there are always ways around it, and that's why it's good to know on a first-hand basis what [kids'] interests are on the Internet - just like in real life. Parents needs to educate themselves about the Net." For example, Ken added, we should know enough about chat, IM, and kids' passworded email accounts at sites such as AOL Anywhere , MSN.com, and Yahoo.com to make sure kids don't put any personally identifiable information in their profiles (which fellow chatters can click to learn more about them). If you don't know what a profile is, ask your child or student!

And if we are going to let our children chat, ideally, they should do so with "people they already know from a face-to-face relationship," Ken said. How can parents control that? we asked him. "Actually watch the screen and ask who he or she is chatting with and make sure it's someone they already know." That's a lot of monitoring, we suggested. "It is," he said, "but it's really important."

*"Online enticement of children for sexual acts" is one of the five crimes the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and its CyberTipline really want to hear about (if you hear about such a case or even have reasonable concerns it could happen to a child you know, call 1-800-THE-LOST or go to CyberTipline.com). The other four are child pornography, prostitution, sex tourism, and sexual molestation outside the family, the operative word in all this being "child." For explanations of the five crimes, please see CyberTipline.com. The NCMEC works closely with the FBI, US Customs, the US Postal Service, and local law enforcement nationwide (including Task Forces like Ken's) in combating those crimes.

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(Very useful) Related links

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Web News Briefs

  1. The Net: Teens' top communications tool

    For US 18- and 19-year-olds, the Internet leaves the telephone in the dust. Ninety-one percent of them use the Net for email and 83% for instant-messaging (IM), and 56% of them say they prefer the Net to the telephone, reports CyberAtlas, citing an AOL Digital Market Services survey. The numbers are only a little lower for younger teens: 81% of those between 12 and 17 use the Internet to e-mail friends or relatives and 70% for IM-ing, both from computers and via wireless devices. Another survey found that the Internet has become so essential for teen communications that a majority of them (55%) "would rather bring a computer with them to a deserted island over a telephone or television," according to AOL's press release on the survey. "The same survey shows that most teens agree that more people will know their email address rather than their phone number within 10 years." Other key findings about teen Net use from the first survey include:

    • 58% of 12-to-17-year-olds and 61% of 18-to-19-year-olds use the Net for homework assignments.
    • 26% of 12-to-17-year-olds and 61% of 18-to-19-year-olds go online for news.
    • 55% of 12-to-17-year-olds and 65% of 18-to-19-year-olds go online to listen to and download digital music.
    • 55% of 12-to-17-year-olds and 65% of 18-to-19-year-olds use the Internet to play games.

    The CyberAtlas piece includes a chart for at-a-glance comparisons.

  2. How the child porn biz works

    For anyone interested in the state of the Net-based child pornography business, The Red Herring paints a very clear picture. This week it ran a well-researched and disturbing investigative report on all aspects of the business - the victims themselves, worldwide, especially in Russia; porn photographers and publishers; credit card companies, their member banks, and sleazy third-party credit-card processors; advertisers, including apparently ill-served ones (whose ads appear with porn because of automated, run-of-site technology); Web site hosting companies turning a blind eye; victims of identity theft whose credit cards are used to pay porn site bills; law enforcement agencies' limited resources; and the legal and constitutional issues surrounding all this.

    The article suggests time may be running out for some of the perpetrators: "The US attorney general, John Ashcroft, has stated that prosecuting child pornographers is a priority. Already, US law enforcement is stepping up international efforts. In March, US Customs worked with the Moscow police to bust Blue Orchid, a Russian child porn Web site. And Justice Department insiders point to [the] imminent [Senate] confirmation [of J. Robert Flores as the Justice Department's Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention] as evidence that the Bush administration will soon aggressively prosecute child pornographers." Red Herring quotes one source as saying the Justice Department is poised to start prosecuting any party involved in child porn publication as a deterrent.

  3. New online encyclopedia of Terrorism

    We think you'll want to know about a new Web site that dispassionately, factually answers questions such as: "Why is Iraq part of the 'axis of evil' President Bush referred to this week?", "How much do we really know about al-Qaeda's presence in Somalia?" and "What is Hamas?" The site, "Terrorism: Questions & Answers", is provided by the Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. Besides answers to the questions above and others like it (archived as answered), it includes a news section called "This Week in the War on Terrorism," and "Top 10" - site users' most frequently visited answer pages. Here is the funding partner's press release on the site at the Markle Foundation.

  4. Fast connecting's downside

    No need to exaggerate the threat of getting hacked at home, but it surely doesn't hurt to know something about how high-speed Net connections leave home PCs vulnerable. In "Home Is Where the Hacker Is," NewsFactor.com spells it out, saying home computers and networks that don't have firewall software to protect them are "a favorite target of hackers and virus writers who are looking for easy prey with less fear of prosecution." NewsFactor quotes security experts say the hackers or virus writers steal into home PCs directly connected to the Internet via a router and turn them into "launchpads" for viruses and other malicious code. The experts also say it's not just the lack of a firewall that renders home PCs vulnerable, its home users' ignorance plus the very ubiquity of the Windows operating system. It's easier to spread a virus worldwide when the vast majority of PC users run Windows and use Explorer email software, and that's over and above these software products' security holes.

  5. Resource for Black History Month

    February is Black History Month in the United States, and CNNStudentNews.com is taking the occasion to feature the history and culture of the Gullah people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. "They are a community of a half-million African-Americans, descendants of slaves who were forced together on South Carolina plantations," according to the CNN press release. The two-part series is about their struggle to "hold on to centuries-old traditions passed down from their West African ancestors" in the face of expanding tourism development. CNN Student News is both a Web site and TV programming that airs in US high school classrooms. Materials include lesson plans, activities, and Web links and other background material. (Last week CNN Newsrooms TV programming and CNNfyi.com Web content merged as CNN Student News and CNNstudentnews.com. This month's programming includes reports from students in the US and Nigeria.)

  6. Students, laptops, & misbehavior

    The story's really about how a school district in Virginia is dealing with all sorts of "bugs" in its nascent, but massive, laptop program - including students' misuse of school computers. As we mentioned in December (see the 11th Web News Brief), nearly 12,000 laptops were distributed to high school students in the Henrico County School District for this school year, and - not terribly surprisingly - there have been problems (such as a clunky Net filtering system) and abuses (game-playing in class, network-clogging, music file-sharing, and porn-downloading, and even a bit of hacking for grade-improvement purposes), Wired News reports. But this pioneering school district is persevering, recalling all the laptops (as it says it planned all along) to clean out unnecessary, student-installed software and install needed fixes and controls. New policies are being established, too. For example, " Students will be prohibited from reconfiguring their machines and will not be able to share files," Wired writes. Educators in Maine are certainly watching (Maine just a four-year, $37.2 million contract with Apple to equip all seventh- and eighth-grade students and teachers in the state with laptops next fall, Wired reported).

  7. Australia's 'Cybersmart Kids Online'

    The Australian Broadcasting Authority recently launched an online-safety resource for kids, parents, and teachers. Cybersmart Kids Online contains a quiz with which children can test their "cybersmarts"; a page where kids can make their own online-safety posters ; links to "coolsites" for children (it's fun for North Americans to see some great kids' sites produced in Australia); an online-safety guide for parents; and Net-safety lesson plans and homework-help links and other good sites for teachers. (Our thanks to Quicklinks.net for pointing out this resource.)

  8. Teen's home raided

    The teen-aged proprietor of RaisetheFist.com and hacker of other Web sites received a sudden, fairly long visit from the US Federal Bureau of Investigations this week. According to the Washington Post, this is "a case that may test limits on Internet free speech in the wake of Sept. 11" and of the passage of the USA Patriot Act. Heavily armed agents raided the Los Angeles home of 18-year-old Sherman Martin Austin and his mother, seizing computers and documents. "In an interview Wednesday, Austin told Newsbytes [of the Washington Post] he was interrogated for more than six hours but has not yet been charged with any crimes." The Post added that an FBI affidavit says he "violated federal computer fraud and abuse laws, as well as statutes prohibiting the distribution of bomb-making information." His site, RaisetheFist.com was back up and running when we checked yesterday (Thursday).

  9. Parents checking teachers' credentials on the Web

    Some are calling it the next step in school accountability. Now Kentucky parents and citizens can "search a single Web site to find out the credentials of every public school teacher in the state," reports eSchoolNews. The "Teacher Certification Inquiry" Web site was created by the Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board, which, according to eSchoolNews, developed the site "to let everyone know what certificates and diplomas each teacher has, as well as the subjects and grade levels they are authorized to teach."

  10. E-learning at the grocery store

    It's an interesting way to get parents to be aware of what their children are learning in school. That's one of the main goals of a new program called "CyberLane" that puts school-connected computers in grocery stores, reports eSchoolNews.com. We weren't sure if parents could have enough shopping to do to give kids much time to learn on these store computers, but it does give access to the Net, computers, and school-provided content to families who don't otherwise have it. And it does give parents with limited English skills a chance to see what's being worked on at school. Also, it sends the message that learning can happen anywhere! During school hours, the grocery store has the use of the computers, on which employees can study English as a second language. The program, a partnership between elementary schools, Publix Groceries, and software maker NCS Learn, is functioning in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia so far.

  11. Gangs in cybercafes

    They're just another sometimes-dangerous hangout: from soccer and football games to concerts and drug parties to cybercafes. At least in southern California, the number of assaults and fights that have occurred in these strip-mall storefronts is such that restrictions are being imposed, reports the Christian Science Monitor . "The Garden Grove City Council, in a move that legal analysts call a harbinger of similar steps in cities across America, last week put a hold on new permits for cybercafe establishments. The council also restricted their hours and set new rules to improve security at the cafes." The Monitor adds that there are 19 cybercafes in Garden Grove (pop. 151,000) now, "with more permits being requested. The city has a diverse racial makeup with a high populations of ethnic Koreans and Vietnamese." One question officials are considering is the tough one about where the violence starts - in the gang culture associated with some of the fights that have occurred or in the Internet games being played in the cafes.

  12. Online gaming more global

    Online gamers like Sean, Glen, and Jake (see our recent series, starting here ) will soon be able to do battle with their counterparts in Asia. "Until recently, players were relegated to competing against fellow countrymen because of language and cultural barriers," reports Wired News , but Sony Online and NCSoft have just teamed up to take the game EverQuest to Asia. But corporate partnerships aren't all it takes for gaming to cross linguistic barriers The Sony-NCSoft deal "gives engineers the opportunity to develop technology systems - called 'universal translators' - that allow people who speak different languages to compete together," Wired News adds. Now there's just the time-difference hurdle (not that nighttime ever stopped the online gamers *we* know - see what Jake says about "LAN parties" , today's much-more-interesting-sounding version of the slumber party).

  13. Nearly half of Europe online

    Only the summary of IDC's recent study is available for free, but the survey found that "close to half of the European population has used the Internet within the past month." Germany and The Netherlands showed the highest Net-use growth rates in 2001, which IDC indicates that "the slow Internet penetration of the past has finally ended." Our thanks to Nua Internet Surveys for pointing this data out.

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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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